(grep) Regex to match non-ascii characters?

Question

On linux i have a directory with lots of files. Some of them have nonASCII characters, but they are all valid UTF8. One programme has a bug that prevents it working with nonASCII filenames, I have to find out how many are affected. I was going to do this with find and then do a grep to print the nonASCII characters, and then do a wc -l to find the number. it doesn't have to be grep, I can use any standard unix regex, like perl, sed, awk, etc.

However I'm not sure if there is a regex for 'any character that's not a ASCII character', is there?

Answer 1

This will match a single non-ASCII char:

[^\x00-\x7F]

This is valid PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression).

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EDIT: [^[:print:]] will probably suffice for you.

Answer 2

You could also to check this page: Unicode Regular Expressions, as it contains some useful Unicode characters classes, like:

\p{Control}: an ASCII 0x00..0x1F or Latin-1 0x80..0x9F control character.