I have a CGI script which has a text field. Users enter some text into the field, and the script writes it to a file. Plain and simple. However, one of my users apparently copied and pasted some text that had some odd characters in it which later caused problems for another script that reads the files. I ran an "od -c <filename>" on the file and found it had ascii code 225 characters in it (see
for an ascii chart; 225 is the beta symbol in the extended table). I'd like to adjust my script to check for that character (or others), but without making it dependent on od being installed on the system. How can I check a block of text for a particular ascii code like 225?