Re: how to scan file for non-ascii chars (egcut-n-paste from ms-word)

[David Combs]

In article <mailman.8.1294595713.11727.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
...
...

>
>---
>
>If you use Icicles, you can also see and search for all
>sequences of non-ascii chars this way:  C-` [^[:ascii]]+
>`S-TAB' to see hits, `C-next' to visit them, etc.

Have not used that package, hear lots of good things about it!

Question: that line-ending plus-sign -- part of the command-string,
or some kind of continuation char?  (Oh no, obvious: the "one or more" 
regexp-char!)

For those (few? many?) of us who don't know icicles, could you
maybe how those two command-strings work, ie sort of translate
each of them into some kind of "emacs-english"?  THANKS!


>http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Search_Commands%2c_Overview
>
>When the set of hits is thus those defined by [^[:ascii]]+, you can type any
>string using a subset of those chars (i.e., one or more particular non-ascii
>chars) to narrow the hits, then visit any of those, and optionally replace any
>or all of them with alternatives.
>http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles_-_Search-And-Replace
>
>

Hmmm.  Maybe a perl program, with hashes, etc, 
I should do it that way?

Seems like overkill, unwiedly too, for something SO COMMONLY
ENCOUNTED...


David