Awk is a simple, but powerful, text processing langauge. It is one of the grandfathers of Perl. I've always thought awk was friendlier and more aesthetically pleasing. In Linux, awk is usually a symlink to the GNU implementation (/bin/gawk).

I am such an awk fan that I wrote a couple of articles about using it:
Learn to talk awk
Turbocharged awk

One liner to find hex characters in a text file

This prints any lines in filename.html that contain hex 92
awk '/\x92/ { print $0 }' filename.html