Perl has modules for extensive manipulation in this area, and Perl reads UTF-8 nativly.

That should be "non-ascii". My question is focusing down to the matching part - I guess I can find the end of character because I'll know how many bytes it has in total from the high bits on the first byte, but I don't know if the "codepoint" includes the high bits or not. I need to find these characters, but also record what they are. My buddy did something similar in java because java could read the file in character by character, and he looked for characters >128. But he just printed the whole line with the offending character, and I want to count the characters. I havn't looked at java faor about a year, but it may be worth swimming through public static void main to get to the solution. My deadline is coming up. Modules: I was hoping to learn how to do this myself, but I am beginning to think this may be beyond me right now. I can't believe nobody else has written a quick little script to do just this. I'm not used to coming up against such a brick wall when I want to do something that seems pretty simple on the face of it. I looked at the ENCODE module; it may do this. I've never used a module before.