Arch Linux

sweetthdevil

Member

Registered: 2009-10-20

Posts: 417

[solved] Downloading the content of a Google Drive Doc

Hello all,

I have put a bash script together that download and print the content of a google drive document onto a local .txt file.

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/sweetth/Downloads
wget --no-check-certificate 'https://docs.google.com/document/export?format=txt&id=[FILE_ID]' -O 'download-doc.txt'

The trouble is that the first line when opening using nano has 3 empty spaces at the beginning of the file and cause issue for what I am intending it to be use. If I open the file in Kate (Kde editor) no empty spaces are shown. If printing it in the terminal no empty spaces is shown neither!?

The trouble is that I tried to used 'sed' or 'awk' command to remove it but nothing work.

I am assuming it's due to the formatting from the Google doc.

Any help or idea would be greatly appreciated.

many thanks

Last edited by sweetthdevil (2022-02-03 16:56:54)

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,330

Website

Re: [solved] Downloading the content of a Google Drive Doc

What's the actual content of the start of the file?  Open it in a hex editor or put the first chunk of the file through a tool like xxd, e.g.:

head -c 16 download-doc.txt | xxd

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

sweetthdevil

Member

Registered: 2009-10-20

Posts: 417

Re: [solved] Downloading the content of a Google Drive Doc

Hi Trilby,

Thank you for your reply, see below the actual content of the start of the file using xxd:

00000000: efbb bf68 7474 7073 3a2f 2f74 6834 796b  ...https://th4yk

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 60,922

Re: [solved] Downloading the content of a Google Drive Doc

That's the BOM, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

---

How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

sweetthdevil

Member

Registered: 2009-10-20

Posts: 417

Re: [solved] Downloading the content of a Google Drive Doc

Brilliant!!

Thank you so much!!

For those that are interested I added the following to the bash script to remove the BOM.

sed -i '1s/^\xEF\xBB\xBF//' download-doc.txt