This will print any characters with values higher than 127, i.e. non-ascii characters that might look like ascii, but really be breaking your processor.
perl -lne'while (my ($c) = $_ =~ m{^(.)}) { print "$c = ".ord($c) if ord($c) > 127; $_ =~ s/^.// }' file_to_check.something
A quick, manual way to confirm some characters really are what you think they are:
cat file_to_check.something | od -bc
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Find dodgy characters in a file
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