# a fancy version of "byte-swapping", combined with "wc"
# (not suitable unless you know the input is UTF-16LE):
 
open( INP, "<:UTF-16LE", "input.file" );
open( OUT, ">:UTF-16BE", "output.file" );

my ( $lines, $words, $chars );
while (<INP>) {
   $lines++;
   $words += scalar( split );  # we're using utf-8 now...
   $chars += length();  # counts _characters_ -- NOT BYTES
   print OUT;
}
printf( "%7d %7d %7d\n", $lines, $words, $chars );