grep not returning text known to be in file

Symptom cat displays text, but grep can't find it: % cat foo.txt The world is overcome--aye! even here! By such as fix their faith on Unity. % grep fix foo.txt % Cause The file is UTF-16, not UTF-8/ASCII. file may correctly identify it as such: file foo.txt foo.txt: Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode text unless the byte-order mark (BOM) is missing, in which case file may report just data , suggesting a…