Question

I am trying to write a Perl script using the utf8 pragma, and I’m getting unexpected results. I’m using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and I’m editing with TextMate. All of my settings for both my editor and operating system are defaulted to writing files in utf-8 format.

However, when I enter the following into a text file, save it as a ".pl", and execute it, I get the friendly "diamond with a question mark" in place of the non-ASCII characters.

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w  use strict; use utf8;  my $str = 'Çirçös'; print( "$str\n" ); 

Any idea what I’m doing wrong? I expect to get ‘Çirçös’ in the output, but I get ‘�ir��s’ instead.

Answer 1

use utf8; does not enable Unicode output – it enables you to type Unicode in your program. Add this to the program, before your print() statement:

binmode(STDOUT, ':utf8'); 

See if that helps. That should make STDOUT output in UTF-8 instead of ordinary ASCII.