How can I match the page break character in a regular expression?

Question

Nano calls it ^L, but of course, typing something like

$ grep -v "^\^L" file

doesn't work. Its unicode codepoint is 000C. How can I match it in a regular expression?

Answer 1

That seems to be the good old form feed character, described in man ascii as:

Oct   Dec   Hex   Char
------------------------------------------
014   12    0C    FF  '\f' (form feed)

(Not mentioned there, but ^L's code is the same 12.)

Then in bash any of these should work:

grep -v $'^\f' file

grep -v $'^\cL' file

grep -v $'\x0C' file