Grep – How to Grep Characters with Their Unicode Value?

Look at grep: Find all lines that contain Japanese kanjis.

Text is usually encoded in UTF-8; so you have to use the hex vales of the bytes used in UTF-8 encoding.

grep "["$'\xe0\xa4\x85'"-"$'\xe0\xa4\xb5'"]"

and

grep '[अ-व]'

are equivalent, and they perform a locale-based matching (that is, matching is dependent on the sorting rules of Devanagari script (that is, the matching is NOT "any char between \u0905 and \0935" but instead "anything sorting between Devanagari A and Devanagari VA"; there may be differences.

($'...' is the "ANSI-C escape string" syntax for bash, ksh, and zsh. It is just an easier way to type the characters. You can also use the \uXXXX and \UXXXXXXXX escapes to directly ask for code points in bash and zsh.)

On the other hand, you have this (note -P):

grep -P "\xe0\xa4[\x85-\xb5]"

that will do a binary matching with those byte values.

My answer is essentially the same as in your other question on this topic:

$ iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 myfile.txt | grep pattern

As in the other question, you might need line ending conversion as well, but the point is that you should convert the file to the local encoding so you can use native tools directly.