I have an application running under Apache/Mod-perl where a user can upload a csv file. The file gets uploaded, and sits in a perl variable, eventually to be loaded into an Oracle CLOB.

I want to detect if the file they've uploaded is binary or text only, and give the user a helpful error message. (Like, if they upload a .xls file.) Note that the file never exists on a filesystem, so I can't use any unix tricks (and I don't want to write out a temp file.)

I figure I can go character-by-character in a loop and look at the ascii values, but that seems horribly inefficient. Is there a quick regex that could do this check? I'm not worried about Unicode characters, but it'd be nice if extended ascii characters through, say, 165 (to get all the accented characters.)

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