How to match none-ascii letters in latin1_swedish_ci charset?

Question

I have this string:Verbesserungsvorschläge which I think is in German.

Now I want to match it with a regex in PHP. To be more general, I want to match such characters like German which are not 100% in the ASCII set.

Answer 1

If you're working with an 8-bit character set, the regex [\x80-\xFF] matches any character that is not ASCII. In PHP that would be:

if (preg_match('/[\x80-\xFF]/', $subject)) {
  # String has non-ASCII characters
} else {
  # String is pure ASCII or empty
}