How do you guarantee that file is ascii? I would think it rapidly would become non-ascii for most users, even for English speakers. You can’t write café in ascii, for example, use curly quotes, or write a pound, euro, or yen sign
I use an HTML reader set to 7-bit ASCII. If necessary I replace or eliminate non-ASCII characters I do not want. I often use flex or tr for this task.
In the situation described in the comment, I'm not sharing these files with anyone else. I'm reading these files myself. As such, other users' preferences are irrelevant.
The submission is about ASCII for "network exchange". But the comment replied to here is not necessarily about ASCII for network exchange. It's about a method used by yours truly for reading large ASCII files.
It's a pain to use any of those characters on every device I use so I don't see how any of them could get in the file if I were to adopt this.
cafe, resume, fiance, etc