Look at the insane number of hoops this person had to do to workaround this major issue (and then it doesn't even print out the matching lines and just says "Binary file ... matches"):

Are there any plans for adding UTF-16 and UTF-32 file support to grep?

Thank you,

Paulie

P.S. The footer on https://debbugs.gnu.org/ pages has a date of 2003, which of course is also very outdated. I hope I'm doing the right thing by sending this email, since there's no way to comment directly in https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=42762