Remove lines that contain non-english (Ascii) characters from a file

Question

I have a text file with characters from different languages like (chinese, latin etc)

I want to remove all lines that contain these non-English characters. I want to inc

Answer 1

You can use egrep -v to return only lines not matching the pattern and use something like [^ a-zA-Z0-9.,;:-'"?!] as pattern (include more punctuation as needed).

Hm, thinking about it, a double negation (-v and the inverted character class) is probably not that good. Another way might be ^[ a-zA-Z0-9.,;:-'"?!]*$.

You can also just filter for ASCII:

egrep -v "[^ -~]" foo.txt