...However, after starting to work with the master list, you realize it is riddled with a bunch of NULL bytes, which chokes your list processor.
removeNULLbytes was made to solve this problem. It will read a master list line by line, remove any NULL bytes, and then write the result into a second file. It treats all files as binary.
This is a simple python script. So simple in fact, that anybody with half an inkling can string together a working approximation with a few minutes on stackoverflow.com. However, if you're as lazy as I am, you'll look for a script already written to do the job for you. This is that script.