Hi Sanjay, even though I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to do and why you're using regular expressions for it, I think I can roughly guess and give you some hints:
\xNN is used to refer to the character with hex-code NN (e.g. \x20 = ASCII 32 = space) Therefore, you could use [\x20-\x7F] for ASCII 32-128 or [\x20-\xFF] for ANSI 32-255 Likewise - obviously, [^\x20-\xFF] would be any character above 255 (or below 32) I hope that will help you solve your problem - some additional hints about your question below: > I am trying to write a validation function that would allow me to detect any > UTF-8 characters just a clarification: UTF-8 is just a "transfer" format: a special way of not wasting too much space when transferring/saving Unicode-characters. There is no such thing as a "UTF-8-character" If there was, it would be a superset of ASCII and every ASCII character would also be a UTF-8 character > Just to give the context -- its a user driven program and we would like to > detect when the user has entered any UTF-8 character Vs. only ASCII > characters. By the way: If that's all you're trying to do, it will probably be MUCH more efficient if you just check each character (like: for (int i = 0; i < s.length(); i++) {if (s.charAt(i) > 255) return i;} return -1;) RegExp does nothing less - actually, it will do much more and cause a lot of overhead > Is there a way by way of expressions that I can detect if the user is > entering UTF-8 characters ... \u or \x something of that sorts... \uNNNN checks for Unicode characters Btw: If you live in Europe, the EURO-symbol (€) is an excellent thing for testing :-) Easy to enter (if you live in Europe *g*), but a "strange" Unicode character in Java (\u20AC) > any help would be greatly appreciated.. HTH, Holger -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>