in reply to accented characters are garbled

I'd wager your first problem is getting your terminal encoding correct. Since the file is UTF-8, and you can't "view" it with curl, your terminal encoding most probably isn't UTF-8. Which terminal are you using? A Linux one or something like PuTTY? Poke around the options a bit.

(ā is a tricky character: it can't be found in the usual legacy latin encodings. That means you can't translate it to a latin encoding -- your best bet is to get UTF-8 working correctly and forget about playing with other character encodings.)

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Re^2: accented characters are garbled
by spspspsp (Initiate) on Feb 18, 2013 at 07:58 UTC
    Yes, it was the terminal setting. Changing vt100 to xterm shows characters fine. Now, how do I replace accented characters with ascii? E.g. ó to o. I tried the following, but it did not work: 
    $city = "Sprîngfíèld";
use utf8;
utf8::upgrade($city);
utf8::encode($city);
print $city;

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      So if you got the display working, why do you now want to strip the diacritics?

      Anyway, Text::Unidecode. And while I'm at it, here's the boilerplate code for getting Perl reasonably UTF-8:

      use utf8;                  # upgrades your strings
my $city = "Sprîngfíèld";
binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(utf-8)");
print $city, "\n";


# use decode_utf8() when reading from e.g. a file
# alternatively, see the binmode() call above
use Encode 'decode_utf8';
my $input_raw = <STDIN>;
my $input = decode_utf8($input_raw);
print $input, "\n";

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