Hello, I have many problems handling UTF8 with perl and I can't understand where they come from. All my system use UTF-8 and I have perl 5.14 that fully support it.

~# perl --version
This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2)
...
~# locale
LANG=en_US.utf8
...
[download]

But I have very strange outputs with perl. In french (and UTF8), the "é" character is encoded by "\x{c3}\x{a9}". But perl say that the "é" string have length = 2 :

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.014;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use strict;
use warnings;

my $string = "\x{c3}\x{a9}";
print length($string)."\n";
print "$string\n";

------------------
~# ./test.pl
2
é
[download]

If I try to use directly UTF8 in the code with "use utf8", perl convert my "\x{c3}\x{a9}" character to "\x{e9}"!? The length is now =1 but I can't display the string ! I have checked that the "é" character is encoded by "\x{c3}\x{a9}" in the source code and ouputed with "\x{e9}" by perl.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.014;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8

my $string = "é";
print length($string)."\n";
print "$string\n";

------------------
~# ./test.pl
1
?
[download]

If I read the "é" character from a file. I can display the string but I still have length = 2 !

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.014;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use strict;
use warnings;

open(HDL,"./test.txt");
my $string = <HDL>;
chomp($string);
print length($string)."\n";
print "$string\n";

------------------
~# cat test.txt 
é
~# ./test.pl
2
é
[download]

I want to remove the accents of my strings. But Unicode::Normalize and Text::Unidecode seem to return inconsistent results !

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.014;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use strict;
use warnings;
use Unicode::Normalize;

my $string = "\x{c3}\x{a9}";
my $decomposed = NFD( $string );
$decomposed =~ s/\pM//g;
$decomposed = NFC( $decomposed );
print length($decomposed)."\n";
print "$decomposed\n";

------------------
~# ./test.pl
2
A?
[download]

Or

#! /usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.014;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::Unidecode;

my $string = "\x{c3}\x{a9}";
my $ascii = unidecode($string);
print length($ascii)."\n";
print "$ascii\n";

------------------
~# ./test.pl
4
A(c)
[download]

I'm completely lost ! Can anyone help me? Thanks. Baptiste.

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