Assuming Unicode, something that I only have passing familiarity with (which, as usually, doesn't preclude me from pontificating about it), the 2-byte characters will not have a first byte with a high-order bit of 0 (that is, the first byte of each pair will have an ASCII value between 128 and 255 -- actually, you can narrow it down further than that since larger-than-two-byte characters, for example, take up part of that range).

So something like s/[\200-\277].//gs should strip out two-byte characters.

Simply matching on /\w/ doesn't work since you will match some of the bytes that are the second half of a two-byte character.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: Regular Expression 1 byte vs 2 byte characters by tye
in thread Regular Expression 1 byte vs 2 byte characters by feloniousMonk

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