Unix command to find non-ascii chars

Question

I have a file 500MB of size. It has some non-ascii characters in it. I just want to find out those characters using Unix command. May it will be better to get the line numbers and position at each line.

Thanks :)

You might find an answer here at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3001177/how-do-i-grep-for-non-ascii-characters-in-unix — vpit3833, Dec 07 '10 at 05:47
@vpit3833: am not very familiar with unix commands, I think that link does not provides the line numbers of those non-ascii chars. am sorry if am wrong... — Mohamed Saligh, Dec 07 '10 at 05:50

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

3

Use the answer given in the other solution, but add -n to grep.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

Community

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answered Dec 07 '10 at 05:51

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams

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score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 07 '10 at 06:17

You know, it's weird. Sometimes I find it faster to code up some quick and dirty C than it is to try and navigate the wilderness of UNIX utility command line options :-)

#include <stdio.h>

int main (void) {
    size_t ln = 1;
    size_t chpos = 0;
    int chr;
    while ((chr = fgetc (stdin)) != EOF) {
        if (chr == '\n') {
            ln++;
            chpos = 0;
            continue;
        }
        chpos++;
        if (chr > 127) {
            printf ("Non-ASCII %02x found at line %d, offset %d\n",
                chr, ln, chpos);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

This will give you both the line number, and the character position within that line, of any characters outside the ASCII range.

Unix command to find non-ascii chars

2 Answers2