Re: Search pattern for non-ASCII alphabetic characters

Hermann Peifer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Occasionally, I'd like to search for non-ASCII alphabetic characters in 
> UTF-8 encoded text documents.
> 
> In the absence of an appropriate character class (at least I wouldn't 
> know of any), I do something like:
> 
> awk '/[ÀÁÂÃÄÅ ...and so on... ŸŹźŻżŽž]/{ action }'
> 
> This is perhaps not the smartest solution. Any better idea?
> 
> TIA. Hermann

I can't tell if it is a smarter solution but you could use the inverse
logic based on the existing character classes...

   LANG=C  awk '/[^[:alnum:][:punct:][:blank:][:cntrl:]]/'

(Note: there's also the ANSI character class [:ascii:] but my GNU awk
seems to not support it.)

Janis