🔍Regex Recipes

Detect Non-ASCII Characters

Find characters outside ASCII range (0-127) for text sanitization.

Pattern

[^\x00-\x7F]

Explanation

Matches any character outside the ASCII range (characters with code > 127). Useful for detecting international characters.

Examples

ASCII only

Input

Hello World

Output

✗ No match

Has accents

Input

Café

Output

✓ Match: é

Has emoji

Input

Hello 👋

Output

✓ Match: 👋

Cyrillic

Input

Привет

Output

✓ Match: all chars

Code Examples

JavaScript

const nonAsciiRegex = /[^\x00-\x7F]/g;

// Check if string contains non-ASCII
function hasNonASCII(str) {
  return nonAsciiRegex.test(str);
}

// Remove non-ASCII characters
function removeNonASCII(str) {
  return str.replace(nonAsciiRegex, '');
}

// Replace with placeholder
function sanitize(str) {
  return str.replace(nonAsciiRegex, '?');
}

// Find all non-ASCII characters
function findNonASCII(str) {
  return str.match(nonAsciiRegex) || [];
}

// Example
const text = 'Hello Café 👋';
console.log(hasNonASCII(text)); // true
console.log(removeNonASCII(text)); // 'Hello Caf '
console.log(findNonASCII(text)); // ['é', '👋']

Try it Now

Open in Regex Tester

💡 Tips

Consider if you need to support international text
Use for validation, not blindly removing
ASCII range: 0-127 (0x00-0x7F)
Extended ASCII: 128-255
For slug generation, transliterate instead of removing

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Removing non-ASCII may break international text
UTF-8 and Unicode are different from ASCII
Extended ASCII (128-255) also matches
Emoji are non-ASCII and may need special handling