emacs:

M-x describe-current-coding-system

Coding system for saving this buffer:
  u -- mule-utf-8-unix

Default coding system (for new files):
  u -- mule-utf-8 (alias: utf-8)

Coding system for keyboard input:
  u -- utf-8 (alias of mule-utf-8)

Coding system for terminal output:
  u -- utf-8 (alias of mule-utf-8)

Defaults for subprocess I/O:
  decoding: u -- mule-utf-8 (alias: utf-8)

  encoding: u -- mule-utf-8 (alias: utf-8)
[download]

bash:

karls-mac-mini:monks karl$ locale
LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
[download]

Can you trust your terminal emulator to properly handle the output?

To me, encoding issues are always a wild goose chase, so I like to eliminate as many things from the encoding dance as quickly as possible. Usually that means that instead of including umlauts (or whatever) in my source code, I use the character names instead:

# instead of
use utf8;
my $s = "göre";
[download]

# I prefer to use
use charnames;
my $s = "g\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}re";
[download]

This eliminates the issue that my text editor is lying to me.

When inspecting the output, I either pipe the output through hexdump or through Data::Dumper with $Data::Dumper::Useqq =1; so the console only sees 7bit ASCII.

This eliminates my terminal emulator lying to me.

Of course, that does not help with reading data from files that I don't control, but every little step helps.

"Can you trust your terminal emulator..."

Sure, i believe always what Apple tells me ;-)

I continue with my investigations.

Thanks and greetings from the Tower of Babel.

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'Help