Question

Is there a way to uppercase accented characters in perl,

my $string = "éléphant";

print uc($string);

So that it actually prints ÉLÉPHANT ?

My perl script is encoded in ISO-8859-1 and $string is printed in an xml file with the same encoding.

Answer 1

perl only understands US-ASCII and UTF-8, and the latter requires

use utf8;

If you want to keep the file as iso-8859-1, you’ll need to decode the text explicitly.

use open ':std', ':encoding(locale)';
use Encode qw( decode );

# Source is encoded using iso-8859-1, so we need to decode ourselves.
my $string = decode("iso-8859-1", "éléphant");
print uc($string);

But it’s probably better to convert the script to UTF-8.

use utf8;  # Source is encoded using UTF-8
use open ':std', ':encoding(locale)';

my $string = "éléphant";
print uc($string);

If you’re printing to a file, make sure you use :encoding(iso-8859-1) when you open the file (no matter which alternative you use).