A special character issue.

Hi Gurus,

I have a file contains special character.

when using:

grep 'xxxxx' filename, 

it returns whole line.
when using:

grep -evt  'xxxxx' filename 

it returns whole line with special charactor.
when running command:

nl filename |grep 'xxxxxx'

the line break by the special charactor.

how can i remove these special charactors?
why the line broke when using "nl " command.

thanks in advance.

is it octal number ?

what is output of od -c < filename

you can remove the control characters using tr command with [:cntrl:]

but it will remove the \r and \n.