Re: say if grep can find non-ascii

[Julian Foad]

Dan Jacobson wrote:
> The grep manual page should say how to do
> $ perl -nwe 'print if /[^[:ascii:]]/'
> but with grep. Or say if there's no way.

I don't think the Grep manual should say explicitly how to do that particular 
thing.  The Grep manual should (and does) describe exactly what Grep can do and 
how to make it do what it can do, and it may give some examples.  Is there any 
particular reason you feel it should describe how to do the equivalent of your 
particular Perl command?

As far as I can tell, you want to find each line that contains a non-ASCII 
character, except that I'm not sure what the definition of "ASCII" is in this 
case, nor how the behaviour of this Perl command is affected by locale.

I assume you've seen in Grep's manual (and I'll assume you're using Grep 
v2.5.1) that it supports a set of character classes such as "[:alnum:]" but not 
"[:ascii:]".

Does the following command do what you want?

  grep '[ -~]'

- Julian