I'd like to test a block of bytes for whether it appears to be "real" text or not. By that I mean, would a human judge it to be text, or "binary"? Conceptually, similar to what the -T/-B operators do, but without the heuristic part: it's either 100% Text, for sure, or else we call it Binary.

I'm pretty sure I could cobble together a regex that does what I want; but I thought there would be a character class (or at most two) which would Do The Right Thing. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be. IsAscii is too broad, as it covers a lot of "control" characters that we don't normally think of as being in text, particularly \000. IsPrint is too narrow, as it doesn't even cover <tab>.

Thanks in advance...

In reply to How to match "text"? by Anonymous Monk

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