Question

How can I find extended ASCII characters in a file using Perl? Can anyone get the script?

…..thanks in advance…..

Answer 1

Since the extended ASCII characters have value 128 and higher, you can just call ord on individual characters and handle those with a value >= 128. The following code reads from stdin and prints only the extended ASCII characters:

while (<>) {
  while (/(.)/g) {
    print($1) if (ord($1) >= 128);
  }
}

Alternatively, unpack together with chr will also work. Example:

while (<>) {
  foreach (unpack("C*", $_)) {
    print(chr($_)) if ($_ >= 128);
  }
}

(I’m sure some Perl guru can condense both of these to two one-liners…)

---

To print the line numbers instead, you can use the following (this does not remove duplicates, and will have odd behaviour when unicode is passed):

while (<>) {
  while (/(.)/g) {
    print($. . "\n") if (ord($1) >= 128);
  }
}

(Thanks Yaakov Belch for the $. tip.)