The solution above recommending code pages and unicode sounds robust and I would explore using a similar solution. However, just for grins, here is a poor man's version that might work for you. I just created a mapping of the DOS extended characters to the Windows ASCII extended characters and use that mapping to replace the appropriate characters. It's not overly robust and I'm not 100% sure it's correct (since I did the mapping myself by looking at DOS and ASCII character charts). Your mileage may vary.

Update: Note that there is not a 1 to 1 mapping between the DOS and ANSI code pages. I mostly just mapped the accented letters and a couple of symbols (such as "cents" etc.) For most text (including Latin foreign languages) this mapping should work fairly well. However, it's not a very robust solution and not very pretty code so if you need to do a lot of this I would recommend one of the other solutions suggested in this thread.

Update #2 In case it's not clear, the hash %asc2dos maps the ANSI (e.g. Windows) ASCII value to the equilavent DOS ASCII value. I then reverse the hash so %dos2asc contains the mapping from DOS back to Windows. As an aside, does anyone have any suggestions for a better or more idiomatic way to reverse the hash (i.e. use the keys as values and vice versa) than what I did below? 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

#mapping of ASCII to DOS
my %asc2dos = (131,159,149,250,150,196,161,173,162,155,163,156,165,157
+,170,166,171,174,172,170,176,248,177,241,178,253,183,249,186,167,187,
+175,188,172,189,171,191,168,196,142,197,143,198,146,199,128,201,144,2
+09,165,214,153,220,154,223,225,224,133,225,160,226,131,228,132,229,13
+4,230,145,231,135,232,138,233,130,234,136,235,137,236,141,237,161,238
+,140,239,139,241,164,242,149,243,162,244,147,246,148,247,246,249,151,
+250,163,251,150,252,129,255,152);

#create the reverse mapping (DOS to ASCII)
my %dos2asc;
foreach my $key (sort keys %asc2dos)
{
    $dos2asc{$asc2dos{$key}} = $key;
}

#here's a test:
#create a string with some accented characters
my $string = pack("C10",223,224,225,232,231,236,237,241,243,244);
print "ASCII string = $string\n";
$string = asc2dos($string);
print "DOS string = $string\n";
$string = dos2asc($string);
print "ASCII string = $string\n";

#convert ASCII extended characters to DOS extended characters
sub asc2dos
{
    my $str = shift;
    foreach my $i (0..length($str)-1)
    {
        my $val = ord substr($str,$i,1);
        substr($str,$i,1) = chr $asc2dos{$val} || $val;
    }
    return $str;
}

#convert DOS extended characters to ASCII characters
sub dos2asc
{
    my $str = shift;
    foreach my $i (0..length($str)-1)
    {
        my $val = ord substr($str,$i,1);
        substr($str,$i,1) = chr $dos2asc{$val} || $val;
    }
    return $str;
}

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In reply to Re: char2oem by RhetTbull
in thread char2oem by Anonymous Monk

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