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Hi. Search did not turn up anything helpful on this topic.

I work with a system that is choking on any file that has a non-ascii character in the text such as a MS Word "smartquote" as one example. But these are fiendishly difficult to "see" plainly in a lot of text.

I'm looking for a regular expression which will basically "find" any character beyond the standard keyboard characters, so I can find whatever might be buried in some files and throwing the error.

Would be SUPER appreciative if anyone could give me a clue in how to go about this. I've worked hard on regex stuff but so far it's always been on things that were regular chars.

RC (PJ)

Is this what you need:
[\x80-\xFF]
?

Thank you! I was just coming back here to paste in:

[^\x00-\x7F]

Which I found elsewhere and believed was the answer. I note they're a bit diff...

[\x80-\xFF] means every character in the range hex 80 (128) to FF (255).
[^\x00-\x7F] means every character not in the range hex 00 (0) to 7F (127).

Thery are equivalent if the text consists entirely of 8-bit characters. Yours is better because it works with characters of arbitrary width.