Print non-ascii/unicode characters in shell

Question

I am using following command to search and print non-ascii characters:

grep --color -R -C 2 -P -n "[\x80-\xFF]" .

The output that I get, prints the line which has non-ascii characters in it. However it does not print the actual unicode character.

Is there a way to print the unicode character?

output

./test.yml-35-
./test.yml-36-- name: Flush Handlers
./test.yml:37:  meta: flush_handlers
./test.yml-38-
--

Answer 1

This was answered in Searching for non-ascii characters . The real issue as shown in Filtering invalid utf8 is that the regular expression you are using is for single bytes, while UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding (and the pattern must therefore cover multiple bytes).

The extensive answer by @ Peter O in the latter Q/A appears to be the best one, using Perl. grep is the wrong tool.