Hi, Team

I am at loss in terms of understanding the encoding process required in Perl with regard to writing results to the command prompt or to a file.

In the below code, the first portion outputs just fine. In portion 2, however, when I added an em dash or the set of characters "ĀǎỠĨǒAder," the output is junk. (Yes, I want to print out ĀǎỠĨǒAder as is.)

use warnings;
use strict;
use Encode qw(encode decode);

# portion 1
my $str = 'Çirçös';
$str = decode('utf-8', $str);
print "$str\n";

# portion 2
my $str1 = 'Çirçös—'; # HTML entity (decimal) for em dash: —
$str1 = decode('utf-8', $str1);
print "$str1\n";

# output from my Eclipse editor

# Çirçös
# Çirçös—
# Wide character in print at D:/EPIC_workspace/PERL/Bibliography/test.
+pl line 10.

[download]

Please help me understand what I am doing wrong.

What I am really trying to do is read a Microsoft Word file that has special characters and store that data into a text file.

Thanks,

Prem

UPDATE: I have found a solution to my problem: http://www.lemoda.net/perl/win32-ole-utf8/cp-utf8-ole.html

I had to set the Win32 component to CP_UTF8 and set the code page of Win32::OLE to CP_UTF8.

Now, even if my Microsoft Word files have special characters such as "Aderñŋšžľŀīửừứ," I could read each line of the Word file and save it in a text file without loss of characters. I thank each of you for your help and time. Greatly appreciated

# Get the constant.
use Win32::OLE 'CP_UTF8';
# Set the code page of Win32::OLE.
$Win32::OLE::CP = CP_UTF8;

[download]

In reply to Perl Encoding/Decoding Doubt: From a Novice by ppremkumar

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