title: How can I query for text containing Asian-language characters in MySQL?
body: <p>I have a MySQL table using the UTF-8 character set with a single column called WORDS of type longtext. Values in this column are typed in by users and are a few thousand characters long.</p>
  
  <p>There are two types of rows in this table:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>In some rows, the WORDS value has been composed by English speakers and contains only characters used in ordinary English writing. (Not all are necessarily ASCII, e.g. the <a href="http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/20ac/index.htm" rel="nofollow">euro symbol</a> may appear in some cases.)</p></li>
  <li><p>Other rows have WORDS values written by speakers of Asian languages (Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and possibly others), which include a mix of English words and words in the Asian languages using their native logographic characters (and not, for example, Japanese romaji).</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>How can I write a query that will return all the rows of type 2 and no rows of type 1? Alternatively, if that's hard, is there a way to query <em>most</em> such rows (here it's OK if I miss a few rows of type 2, or include a few false positives of type 1)?</p>
  
  <p>Update: Comments below suggest I might do better to avoid the MySQL query engine altogether, as its regex support for unicode doesn't sound too good. If that's true, I could extract the data into a file (using <code>mysql -B -e "some SQL here" &gt; extract.txt</code>) and then use perl or similar on the file. An answer using this method would be OK (but not as good as a native MySQL one!) </p>