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I am trying to use Perl to rescue some legacy word processor files.
The files are ascii, except that some control codes use
bytes in the $80-$ff ranges. I slurp the file into a string for editing.

Regex can hand the bytes <\x7f, but fails to recognize bytes that are \x80
or above.

e.g.,

/\x03//; works
/\x81//; doesn't

Since I thought the problem might be related the adoption of unicode, I've
tried various things like;

no encoding;
use bytes;
and various forms of encoding;
etc.

Nothing helps.

I'm using Perl 5.8+(whatever the lastest revision is) with Redhat Linux
8.0.

Is this something a Perl regex just can't handle?

JEB