Just for grins, download the script I posted here a while ago: tlu -- TransLiterate Unicode. Run your "funky" data through that script and see what comes out.

If you see stuff that looks like \x{02BC} or \x{2019} then what you have is utf8 text data with some "wide" characters in it, and your initial problem, as explained by ikegami, is that you aren't looking at it the right way or using the right tools to view it. The "tlu" script converts wide characters into their "literal" hex-numeric code-point form, using perl syntax by default.

Some of your wide characters will have ascii and (single-byte) Latin-1 equivalents (e.g. the apostrophe or right-single-quote mark or the copyright symbol), but some might not. By reading the data as utf8 (the way it's supposed to be read), there are lots of ways in perl to easily fix or remove them as you see fit.

In reply to Re: Matching  & € type characters with a regex by graff
in thread Matching  & € type characters with a regex by Rodster001

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