Sanitise ascii

Skill rondomondo/agent-skills-beta/skills/sanitise-ascii

Plug-and-play skills for Agents that give actionable steps, tool integrations, and verifiable outputs. Includes a sandbox inspector for remote running environments with automatic HTML reports of same, Mermaid diagrams, and PDF export.

Install

npx -y skills add rondomondo/agent-skills-beta --skill sanitise-ascii

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

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What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Sanitise non-ASCII characters from Markdown and SKILL files before they might be added to Agents, Harnesses, GitHub etc. General sharing. Use this skill whenever the user wants to check or clean .md files for non-ASCII, typographic, or mojibake characters. Trigger on "sanitise", "sanitize", "ascii clean", "check for non-ascii", "clean before push", "strip unicode", or any request to prepare skill/markdown files for Remote Agent use, GitHub or other sharing. Also trigger proactively at the end of any workflow that produces or edits .md files if the user has asked for ASCII-clean output.

SKILL.md

4.6 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

ASCII Sanitise Skill

Ensures Markdown and SKILL.md files contain only ASCII characters before they are committed or shared. Auto-fixes known typographic characters; flags anything it cannot fix.

Tools

Two deliverables live in the repo root (or ~/.git-hooks/ for global use):

File	Purpose
`sanitise-ascii.py`	Standalone script -- run manually or from CI
`pre-commit-sanitise-ascii`	Git hook -- runs automatically on every commit

Running manually

The script requires Python. Use whichever invocation works in your environment:

# Fix a specific file
./sanitise-ascii.py path/to/SKILL.md        # if executable bit is set
python3 sanitise-ascii.py path/to/SKILL.md  # explicit python3
python sanitise-ascii.py path/to/SKILL.md   # on systems where python = python3

# Fix all .md files under a directory
./sanitise-ascii.py --dir ./skills

# Check only (no writes) -- exits 1 if non-ASCII found
./sanitise-ascii.py --check path/to/SKILL.md

# Allow emoji (checkmarks, crosses) through without flagging
./sanitise-ascii.py --allow-emoji path/to/SKILL.md

The script has a #!/usr/bin/env python3 shebang, so chmod +x sanitise-ascii.py and running it directly is the most portable option.

Installing the pre-commit hook

Single repo

cp .githooks/pre-commit-sanitise-ascii /path/to/repo/.git/hooks/
chmod +x /path/to/repo/.git/hooks/pre-commit-sanitise-ascii
cp scripts/sanitise-ascii.py /path/to/repo/sanitise-ascii.py

All repos (global)

mkdir -p ~/.githooks
cp .githooks/pre-commit-sanitise-ascii ~/.githooks/
chmod +x ~/.githooks/pre-commit-sanitise-ascii
git config --global core.hooksPath ~/.githooks

# Put the script somewhere on PATH, e.g.:
cp scripts/sanitise-ascii.py /usr/local/bin/sanitise-ascii.py

The hook finds sanitise-ascii.py by looking in:

Repo root
Hooks directory
PATH

If it cannot find the script it warns and allows the commit through (non-blocking degradation).

What gets fixed automatically

Codepoint	Name	Replaced with
U+2013	en dash	`-`
U+2014	em dash	`--`
U+2018/19	curly single quotes	`'`
U+201C/D	curly double quotes	`"`
U+2026	ellipsis	`...`
U+00A0	non-breaking space
U+2022	bullet	`-`
U+2192	right arrow	`->`
U+2190	left arrow	`<-`
U+00AE	registered	`(R)`
U+00A9	copyright	`(C)`
U+2122	trademark	`(TM)`

See REPLACEMENTS dict in sanitise-ascii.py for the full map.

What is NOT auto-fixed

Characters not in the replacement map
Emoji (✅ ❌) -- flagged unless --allow-emoji is passed
Actual language characters (accented letters etc.) -- these are flagged as WARNs and block the commit until resolved manually

Mojibake note

This can be tricky. The â character (and similar) is not itself a problem -- it is a symptom of UTF-8 content being read as Latin-1. The root cause is the source character (e.g. an en dash, U+2013, encoded as 0xE2 0x80 0x93 in UTF-8). Fixing the source character eliminates the mojibake wherever it appears downstream.

Adding to CI

# GitHub Actions example
- name: Check ASCII cleanliness
  run: ./sanitise-ascii.py --check --dir ./skills

Extending the fix map

Edit REPLACEMENTS in sanitise-ascii.py. Each entry is:

"\uXXXX": "ascii-equivalent",

Run python3 sanitise-ascii.py --check <file> to discover new offenders -- it prints the Unicode codepoint and surrounding context for each unfixed character.