http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1015958


in reply to Replacing non ascii in string

This will remove the non ascii characters,also creates backup file in file.backup file.

You can do the job with a perl one liner:   perl -i.backup -pe 's/[[:^ascii:]]//g;' file

Also, $str =~ s/[^!-~\s]//g; In the above, !-~ is a range which matches all characters between ! and ~. The range is set between ! and ~ because these are the first and last characters in the ASCII table.This does not include whitespace, so i added \s also.