Find won't work in TextEdit

Question

I opened a file in TextEdit. I saved it as Plain Text, but left it open. When I returned to edit the file again, it had "garbage" characters at the top and at the bottom. Instead of just closing the file without doing another save, I edited out the garbage then I saved and closed the file. When I opened the file again, it looked fine, but when I used the Find command in TextEdit, it doesn't find text I know is in the file. It almost as if it doesn't recognize the file as text. I dropped into a Terminal window and ran the Unix "file" command. It says the file is of type "data." My other .txt files are type "ASCII text." I tried cutting and pasting some of the text in the file to a new file and checked to see if it was searchable with Find. It's not. Is there any way I can make this file searchable again?

Answer 1

I discovered a way to restore the original (non-corrupt) version of my file. I dropped into a Terminal window and executed the following command:
tr -cd "\011\012\015[\040-\177]" < corrupt_filename.txt > good_filename.txt
This bascially says strip out all of the characters from the file named "corrupt_filename.txt" that aren't a tab (011), a line feed (012), a carriage return (015) or a printable ASCII character (040-177) and save the result to a file called "good_filename.txt".
The resulting file is of type "ASCII English text, with CR, LF line terminators" instead of "data" so it is again searchable in TextEdit.
Do a "man tr" in a Terminal window to see complete documentation for the tr command.