How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I would like to be able to test a string to see if it contains non-ascii characters.
At the moment I'm using a negated character class of the hex range as below. Are there any better ways of doing the test?

sub ascii_test{
my $string = shift;
if ($string =~ /[^\x00-\x7f]/){
   return "[$string] contains non ascii characters";
}
else{
   return "[$string] is all ascii";
}

}
[download]

Comment on How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters Download Code

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Re: How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters by japhy (Canon) on Jul 13, 2001 at 15:46 UTC
That's pretty much the best way to do it. You done good. `japhy` -- Perl and Regex Hacker	[reply]
Re: Re: How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters by Anonymous Monk on Jul 13, 2001 at 16:00 UTC
Thanks. I couldn't think of any other sensible way of doing it but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything obvious. It would have been nice if there was already a pre-defined character class for this though.(since \A and \a are already taken so I suppose \I and \i?)	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters by japhy (Canon) on Jul 13, 2001 at 16:08 UTC
There is a POSIX macro for this: `[:ascii:]`. That is NOT a character class in and of itself -- it must be used IN a character class: `if ($string =~ /[^[:ascii:]]/) { # a non-ASCII character was found! }` [download] `japhy` -- Perl and Regex Hacker	[reply] [d/l]
Re4: How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters by Hofmator (Curate) on Jul 13, 2001 at 19:40 UTC
(tye)Re: How do I determine if a string contains non ascii characters by tye (Sage) on Jul 13, 2001 at 19:18 UTC
Agreed. Though things that have problems with "8-bit characters" often also have problems with nul bytes and some control characters so you might consider `/[^ -~\s]/` which leaves out nul, "\x7f", and all of the control characters except for the usual "\t\f\r\n". Just depends on what you need. (: - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply] [d/l]