Removing " ^@ " from a file

[google]

I have a file on my Linux box that has this strange control character
combination (^@) in it at the beginning of every line. I can only
remove this from VI. I have tried using sed, tr, and others to remove
it, but none work. How can I remove this control character sequence
via PHP??

^@^@
^@^@ DPCA ALIASI ALIASN/N24 CLLI LSN RC
APCA
^@^@ 208-000-000 ------- ----------- alias208000 bi403239 0
208-001-000
^@^@ bi403240 0
208-002-000
^@^@ cc403000 10
235-002-000
^@^@ 235-243-002 ------- ----------- ----------- bn403131 0
235-007-000
^@^@ bn403132 0
235-006-000
^@^@ cc403000 2
235-002-000
^@^@ 226-251-070 ------- ----------- vancbcxpgt0 bm403044 0
226-008-000

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Stuff like ^D and ^M are
easy. They can be removed with regular expressions. However, this ^@
sequence just refuses to budge.

Alternatively, does anyone have any suggestions on how I can avoid
getting it in the first place? I obtain this file by telneting from a
linux (red hat) command prompt to a Tekelec Eagle STP with the output
piped to a file. The same thing happens when I telnet to this box
using Expect.

[justbn]

I finally found it! Thanks to reading a post just a few hours before
my post. The answer was :

$line = preg_replace('[\c@]','',$line);

I found this thanks to Kenneth Downs in his response to the post : "
regexp to leave only alpha/numeric chars"