# How do I search for non-ASCII characters?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-search-for-non-ascii-characters/161852
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [December 21, 2018, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-search-for-non-ascii-characters/161852 "2018-12-21T13:37:27Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@TimWard](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/TimWard)
#### Post date: [December 21, 2018, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-search-for-non-ascii-characters/161852/1 "2018-12-21T13:37:27Z")
I've got a load of log data in Elasticsearch. Most of it is in ASCII, but very occasionally there's a non-ASCII character ... which breaks a downstream naive Python application.
What query can I use to find the documents that contain non-ASCII characters? - yes I'll need to fix the downstream code anyway, but it would be interesting to know what is generating non-ASCII log documents. Example: all I know about a document is that it contains a U+FFFD character - how do I search for that?
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 18, 2019, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/how-do-i-search-for-non-ascii-characters/161852/2 "2019-01-18T13:37:29Z")
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