How can I open a Unicode file with Perl?

Question

I\'m using osql to run several sql scripts against a database and then I need to look at the results file to check if any errors occurred. The problem is that Perl doesn\'t

Answer 1

The file is presumably in UCS2-LE (or UTF-16 format).

C:\Temp> notepad test.txt

C:\Temp> xxd test.txt
0000000: fffe 5400 6800 6900 7300 2000 6900 7300  ..T.h.i.s. .i.s.
0000010: 2000 6100 2000 6600 6900 6c00 6500 2e00   .a. .f.i.l.e...

When opening such file for reading, you need to specify the encoding:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict; use warnings;

my ($infile) = @ARGV;

open my $in, '<:encoding(UCS-2le)', $infile
    or die "Cannot open '$infile': $!";

Note that the fffe at the beginning is the BOM.