This is a clarified and restated question. I have a file in UTF-8 format and I want to find and tally all of the non-ascii characters in it. The very first steps are paralyzing me. With the patient help of Thelonius, John M. Dlugosz, and others, I have come this far:

while (<FILE>){
  if(/[\xc0-\xfd]/)#found lead byte of a multibyte sequence

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My data has a maximum character length of 3 bytes, but I might not have known that. How do I grab at the entire character, so I can put it into a hash tallying the number of times it appears? The camel says "regular expressions match characters instead of bytes". The man pages on pack() and unpack() say something clearly important that I am unable to comprehend at my stage. Can somebody either hint at the next step in my code, or direct me to documentation that would help? Thank you

In reply to regex: searching for multi-byte characters by jjohhn

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