Installation
Quick Take
Checks for unencoded or invisible characters, checks each line’s length.
Use it
Once installed, call it on a file:
ascii YOURFILE.html
or omit the file name and CLI will let you pick a file.
Idea
This CLI app will check, does your HTML file (or some other extension) contains non-ASCII characters.
Specifically, it will check, are your file contents suitable for 7bit encoding, in other words, are all characters within the basic ASCII range, the first 126 (not 127 because of DEL) characters.
Plus, we don’t want any invisible control characters (anything below decimal point 32), EXCEPT:
HT, horizontal tab, decimal number 9LF, new line, decimal number 10CR, carriage return, decimal number 13
Also, we don’t want character at a decimal point 127, DEL, which technically falls within basic ASCII range but might appear broken in email-consumption software.
Practical use
We’re going to use this library to validate our email templates, as a part of final QA. In theory, all email templates should be HTML encoded and have no characters outside the basic ASCII range (or invisible control characters like ETX). In practice, all depends on the server, because your ESP back-end might encode the rogue characters for you. But it might not, and you’d be in trouble.
We’re going to prepare for the worst and deliver all our templates ready for ANY encoding, conforming to 7bit spec: no characters beyond first 126 decimal point.
Check out the API of this CLI which works well in Gulp environment.