Re: How to search for characters displayed as octal codes in the buffer?

[Dan Sommers]

On 7/16/19 8:43 PM, Noam Postavsky wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Jul 2019 at 10:50, ndame <emacsuser@freemail.hu> wrote:
> > Sometimes I have unprintable characters in the buffer which display with an 
> > octal code (e.g. \232). instead of a character (text copied from elsewhere, 
> > etc.) How can I find these without knowing the exact codes?
> >
> > I'd like to find all such places in the buffer where a character appears with 
> > an octal code, but I have UTF characters too in the buffer which display 
> > properly, so using nonascii is not the answer.
>
> (re-search-forward "[\x80-\xff]") seems to work, though it's a bit
> awkward to enter interactively:
>
> C-M-s [ C-x 8 RET 3fff80 RET - C-x 8 RET 3fffff RET ]


Use quoted-insert (usually C-q) in the mini buffer once the
search is active.  One trick is that quoted-insert collects
digits until it sees a non-digit, so I often have to add and
then delete a space character to the search.

So to search for \232:

     C-s C-q 2 3 2 SPC <backspace>

HTH,
Dan