How Do I grep For non-ASCII Characters in UNIX

Posted by Peter Conrey on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Peter Conrey
Published on 2010-06-08T20:48:13Z Indexed on 2010/06/08 20:52 UTC
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regex

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unix

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unicode

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grep

I have several very large XML files and I'm trying to find the lines that contain non-ASCII characters. I've tried the following:

grep -e "[\x{00FF}-\x{FFFF}]" file.xml

But this returns every line in the file, regardless of whether the line contains a character in the range specified.

Do I have the syntax wrong or am I doing something else wrong? I've also tried:

egrep "[\x{00FF}-\x{FFFF}]" file.xml

(with both single and double quotes surrounding the pattern).

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