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Asked: 2026-05-10T22:16:23+00:00

I have a small program to order and sort email messages, outputting to a

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I have a small program to order and sort email messages, outputting to a textfile using $msg->decoded->string. The perl program outputs to stdout, and I redirect it to a txt file. However, gedit is unable to open this text file because of a character set problem, and I would like to know how to restore or set a character set with perl.

The program is now thus:

#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Mail::Box::Manager;  open (MYFILE, '>>data.txt');  my $file = shift || $ENV{MAIL}; my $mgr = Mail::Box::Manager->new(     access          => 'r', );  my $folder = $mgr->open( folder => $file ) or die '$file: Unable to open: $!\n';  for my $msg ( sort { $a->timestamp <=> $b->timestamp } $folder->messages) {     my $to          = join( ', ', map { $_->format } $msg->to );     my $from        = join( ', ', map { $_->format } $msg->from );     my $date        = localtime( $msg->timestamp );     my $subject     = $msg->subject;     my $body        = $msg->decoded->string;      # Strip all quoted text     $body =~ s/^>.*$//msg;      print MYFILE <<''; From: $from To: $to Date: $date $body  }

However I get the same problem that I am unable to open the file with gedit, even though it works with vi or such. If there are non unicode characters in the file, would this break it?

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1 Answer

  1. Different messages probably are in different encodings. Probably gedit detects it as UTF-8, but later finds out that parts of the file aren’t UTF-8. Mixed files like this are major PITA.

    The best (perhaps only) solution is to check for the content type ($message->contentType) and convert everything to UTF-8.

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