the regex is designed, and intended, to rip out all chars that are not explicitly listed as cool (hence the ^).

the hexadecimal range is not used. i tested with, multiple character sequences, the exact regex in CGI, and console-based scripts with user-input and statically defined variables. the result is always the same, the extended ascii chars are removed.

is there a reason why the hexadecimal range may not be by the perl interpreter? note that there are no warnings under -w. also note that i've even isolated the hexadecimal range in an if ($line =~ /\x80-\xA5/) {print "$line\n"} but nothing happens...