Remove ^@ characters from linux file

Question

I have a file which has visible ^@ characters (blue) after each character. I can see these characters only in vi file.txt. I am unable to view these characters using cat. How can I remove them?

I tried using the following command:

sed "s/[^@]//g" a.txt > b.txt 

However this didn't seem to alter the file.

Answer 1

try iconv -f UTF16 -t UTF8 <your-file> > <new-file>

Answer 2

dos2unix file.txt file.txt. This will do..

Answer 3

This works:

sed "s/[\^@]//g" a.txt > b.txt 

Answer 4

I remove all files in dir with inappropriate symbols in a such way:

for i in *.*;do 
  
  case "$i" in 
   
  *[\(\)\!\*\%\^\ ]*) 
    mv "$i" ${i//[^a-zA-Z0-9.]/_}
  ;;
  esac
   
done

[()!*%^\ ] -- stands for eliminate any symbol from the set of: ()!*%^ and space [^a-zA-Z0-9.] -- stands for not English low and upper cases charecters, numbers and dots

What is important it only renames files containing 'bad' characters.