Perl on Windows: Problems with Encoding

Question

I have a problem with my Perl scripts. In UNIX-like systems it prints out all Unicode characters like ä properly to the console. In the Windows commandline, the characters are broken to senseless glyphs. Is there a simple way to avoid this? I'm using use utf8;.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

use utf8; simply tells Perl your source is encoded using UTF-8.

It's not working on unix either. There are some strings that won't print properly (print chr(0xE9);), and most that do will print a "Wide character" warning (print chr(0x2660);). You need decode your inputs and encode your outputs.

In unix systems, that's usuaully

use open ':std', ':encoding(UTF-8)';

In Windows system, you'll need to use chcp to find the console's character page. (437 for me.)

use open ':std', ':encoding(cp437)';  # Encoding used by console
use open IO => ':encoding(cp1252)';   # Encoding used by files