View Delimiters and Invisible Characters

Often time you need to know whether a while space is a tab or space, and whether an invisible character has been used as delimiters.

Linux

You can use cat -t including (cat -t | head) to show invisible characters

e.g.:

cat -t sample_artist_data.txt | head

1134999^I^A06Crazy^B Life
6821360^IPang^C Nakarin
10113088^ITerfel, Bartoli- Mozart: Don
10151459^IThe Flaming Sidebur
6826647^IBodenstandig 3000

where - ^I: tab (\t) - ^A: control-A (\001) - ^B: control-B (\002) - ^C: control-C (\003)

Windows

In windows, with Notepad++, turn on the "Show All Characters" (menu> view > show symbol > show all characters)

In sublime, if you select text, it will show invisible characters including space and tab.

Additionally, you may use regex search (\t, \n, \r,\001 etc) to highlight special characters.