How do I remove all non-ASCII characters with regex and Notepad++?

Question

I searched a lot, but nowhere is it written how to remove non-ASCII characters from Notepad++.

I need to know what command to write in find and replace (with picture it would be great).

If I want to make a white-list and bookmark all the ASCII words/lines so non-ASCII lines would be unmarked
If the file is quite large and can't select all the ASCII lines and just want to select the lines containing non-ASCII characters...

score 327 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 07 '18 at 22:05

327

This expression will search for non-ASCII values:

[^\x00-\x7F]+

Tick off 'Search Mode = Regular expression', and click Find Next.

Source: Regex any ASCII character

edited Aug 07 '18 at 22:05

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jan 02 '14 at 19:11

ProGM

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and just in case it isn't obvious, if you remove the "^" you are searching the ASCII lines – Mike M Jan 02 '14 at 19:21
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Works good, but I had to set `Encoding->Encode in ANSI`. Was unable to find anything otherwise. – FoamyGuy Oct 14 '14 at 14:22
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Works perfectly in netbeans with its regexp-search option (asterix-button) – Teson Jun 10 '15 at 09:45
works in VS-Code, don't forget to click Regex search option! – yashhy Dec 10 '17 at 15:39
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If you want to keep \r and \n - carriage return and linefeed characters - you can use this regex: [\x00-\x09\x0B-\x0C\x0E-\x1F]+ – Steffen Winkler Dec 14 '17 at 10:10
is there any way to automate this?? – oldboy Sep 06 '18 at 02:34
Why can't this expression find single characters? there must be at least 2 such to be detected with it in Notepad++ – Anatoly Alekseev Oct 25 '18 at 09:34

score 69 · Answer 2 · edited May 22 '23 at 22:38

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In Notepad++, if you go to menu Search → Find characters in range → Non-ASCII Characters (128-255) you can then step through the document to each non-ASCII character.

Be sure to tick off "Wrap around" if you want to loop in the document for all non-ASCII characters.

When you press find it selects the character. Then go to the Edit menu and pick Replace, and the "find" box will be filled with the current selection, which will be the character you found.

Then you can do the rest of the find/replace in the normal dialog.

edited May 22 '23 at 22:38

Darren

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answered May 16 '14 at 22:55

Anon Y. Mous

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This works well, but doesn't show all results in a list and no "replace" option – Alex Jul 09 '14 at 19:42
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Neat... because I always forget the regex for the non-ASCII and have to Google it each time to go back to this page :) – Jean-Francois T. Oct 31 '19 at 01:52
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So the trick with this is when you press find here it selects the character. Then you just go to the Edit menu and pick Replace, and Notepad++ always fills the "find" box in with the current selection, which will be the character you found. So you can do the rest of the find/replace in the normal dialog. – Jason C Dec 01 '21 at 02:03

score 32 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 07 '18 at 22:07

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In addition to the answer by ProGM, in case you see characters in boxes like NUL or ACK and want to get rid of them, those are ASCII control characters (0 to 31), you can find them with the following expression and remove them:

[\x00-\x1F]+

In order to remove all non-ASCII AND ASCII control characters, you should remove all characters matching this regex:

[^\x1F-\x7F]+

edited Aug 07 '18 at 22:07

Peter Mortensen

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answered Jan 17 '15 at 16:33

brunorey

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Values from `\x00` and `\x1F` are already matched in the answer by ProGM. – Unihedron Jan 17 '15 at 17:35
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They're matched as values you'd like to keep. I was just suggesting this in case you want to get rid of them. – brunorey Jan 19 '15 at 13:47
The last example should begin at 20 to exclude the unit separator character. Maybe exclude 7F as well as it's a control character too. – fgb Jan 21 '16 at 18:21
Brilliant! I removed all pesky non-ASCII characters using the qdap R package using: `mgsub("[^\x1F-\x7F]+", "", text_vector, fixed = FALSE)` – Pablo Adames Jun 26 '19 at 22:50

Jean-Francois T. · Answer 4 · 2019-10-21T08:21:10.160

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To remove all non-ASCII characters, you can use following replacement: [^\x00-\x7F]+

To highlight characters, I recommend using the Mark function in the search window: this highlights non-ASCII characters and put a bookmark in the lines containing one of them

If you want to highlight and put a bookmark on the ASCII characters instead, you can use the regex [\x00-\x7F] to do so.

Cheers

edited Oct 21 '19 at 08:21

answered Jun 21 '16 at 07:04

Jean-Francois T.

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if you want to copypaste the search expression [^\x00-\x7F]+ – hyena Nov 22 '16 at 18:51
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If you want to keep \r and \n - carriage return and linefeed characters - you can use this regex: [\x00-\x09\x0B-\x0C\x0E-\x1F]+ – Steffen Winkler Dec 14 '17 at 10:10

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 17 '16 at 20:01

To keep new lines:

First select a character for new line... I used #.
Select replace option, extended.
input \n replace with #
Hit Replace All

Select Replace option Regular Expression.
Input this : [^\x20-\x7E]+
Keep Replace With Empty
Hit Replace All

Now, Select Replace option Extended and Replace # with \n

:) now, you have a clean ASCII file ;)

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Oct 30 '16 at 16:49

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Another good trick is to go into UTF8 mode in your editor so that you can actually see these funny characters and delete them yourself.

answered Oct 30 '16 at 16:49

Gidon Wise

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score 3 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 14 '16 at 18:05

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Another way...

Install the Text FX plugin if you don't have it already
Go to the TextFX menu option -> zap all non printable characters to #. It will replace all invalid chars with 3 # symbols
Go to Find/Replace and look for ###. Replace it with a space.

This is nice if you can't remember the regex or don't care to look it up. But the regex mentioned by others is a nice solution as well.

answered Dec 14 '16 at 18:05

goku_da_master

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Zapping all characters replaces all type of punctuation marks with ###. The solution I would expect is: Replacing “ & ” with ". Replacing ‘ & ’ with '. etc. – Kasim Husaini Apr 19 '17 at 06:40
It works fine, however, the tool replaces funny chars with one # char and not three. please take note. – Raghav Aug 16 '17 at 13:58
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The Text FX plugin is deprecated and may not even be readily available anymore. See e.g. *[TextFX's Future](http://docs.notepad-plus-plus.org/index.php/TextFX%27s_Future)* - *"When the list grows long enough, it will become practical to bid farewell to an aging workhorse that has served the community well."* – Peter Mortensen Aug 07 '18 at 22:08
The name has now been [highjacked by Google](https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D37161441&rut=90224086e5c465635d790f8dd1d882eface9a4b473c4de90c4cc4b4c65c84b16) (2023). – Peter Mortensen Aug 20 '23 at 11:54

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Feb 11 '21 at 16:25

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Click on View/Show Symbol/Show All Character - to show the [SOH] characters in the file Click on the [SOH] symbol in the file CTRL=H to bring up the replace Leave the 'Find What:' as is Change the 'Replace with:' to the character of your choosing (comma,semicolon, other...) Click 'Replace All' Done and done!

answered Feb 11 '21 at 16:25

RipVduB

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Do you **really** want to do that for **ALL** non ASCII characters? They are thousands! – Toto Feb 11 '21 at 17:41

score 0 · Answer 9 · edited Sep 12 '22 at 05:08

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In addition to Steffen Winkler:

[\x00-\x08\x0B-\x0C\x0E-\x1F]+

Ignores \r \n AND \t (carriage return, linefeed, tab)

edited Sep 12 '22 at 05:08

4b0

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answered Jun 03 '22 at 10:33

michibr81

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How do I remove all non-ASCII characters with regex and Notepad++?

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