Question

So I’m trying to write a perl script to read in a file encoded in Latin-1. For some reason, this just isn’t working out. When I try to do a simple search for a character that I know is in the file (it’s in the first line), nothing shows up. I’m using use encoding “iso 8859-1”; below, but I’ve also tried binmode(STDIN, “:utf8”);. Any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong, and how to make it right?

use encoding "iso 8859-1";

while(<>)
{
    if(/ó/gi)
    {
    print "Found one!\n";
    }
}

Answer 1

Don’t use the use encoding pragma: it’s broken.

Either specify the encoding here:

use open ":encoding(Latin1)";

or put it in the open itself:

open(FH, "< :encoding(Latin1)", $pathname)
   || die "can't open $pathname: $!";

or binmode it after opening:

binmode(FH, ":encoding(Latin1)")
   || die "can't binmode to encoding Latin1";

If you’re using <ARGV>, then use open is probably easiest.

Don’t forget to set the encoding on your output streams, too.