in reply to Re^2: By the shine on my bald pate, I dislike this encoding stuff
in thread By the shine on my bald pate, I dislike this encoding stuff

Empty string

All the content is read into @LINES so $filedata is empty

my(@LINES) = <ORDERFILE>;
my $filedata = <ORDERFILE>;

Maybe try

my @LINES = <ORDERFILE>;
my $filedata = join '',@LINES;

or just

open ORDERFILE, '<', $emailfile or die "$emailfile: $!";
my $filedata = do { local $/; <ORDERFILE> };
close ORDERFILE;
poj

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Re^4: By the shine on my bald pate, I dislike this encoding stuff
by jfrm (Monk) on Mar 04, 2018 at 11:23 UTC

    Thank you. I had no idea. That does work for the files that are ANSI. Most bizarrely,

    my @LINES = <ORDERFILE>; my $filedata = join '',@LINES;

    works but the following does not + I get loads of warnings: "utf8 "\xA3" does not map to Unicode"

    my $filedata = <ORDERFILE>;
      my $filedata = <ORDERFILE>;

      That only reads the first line of the file.

      poj