I can't seem to wrap my brain around how Perl traslates Unicode. I'm trying to gather SMTP addresses from a source, and interject them into a Mailsweeper config file. Mailsweeper, however, seems to store it's config files in Unicode, rather than ASCII. Therefore, when the following script is run, all of the data appears to be there, there's just a blank space in between every character, except for the portion that I interjected. Help is much appreciated. 
$filesenders = "z:/train/whitesenders.txt";
$fileaddrlist = "z:/Program Files/Mailsweeper for SMTP/Config/shared/a
+ddrlist.test";

#Read and arrayify list of SMTP addresses
open SENDERSREAD, $filesenders or die "unable to open sender file" ;
foreach $newsender (<SENDERSREAD>) {
  chomp $newsender;
  push @senders, $newsender;
}
#Open MailSweeper Addrlist.cfg and pull address lists into a hash of a
+rrays
open (CONFIGREAD, "<:utf8", $fileaddrlist) or die "UNable to open conf
+ig file for read";
print "Reading Config File...\n";
foreach (<CONFIGREAD>) {
  chomp;
  if (/\[(.*)\]/) {
    $currhead = $1;
    print "$currhead\n";
    next;
  }
  next if (!(/./)); #Check for and omit blank lines
  push @{$config{$currhead}}, $_;
}
close CONFIGREAD;

#Put senders captured from file into appropriate list
foreach (@senders) {
  push @{$config{'AddressList\Scripted Whitelist'}}, "v:Member=\$S\"$_
+\"";
}
#write updated config to file, overwriting existing file
open (CONFIGWRITE, ">:encoding(UTF-8)", $fileaddrlist) or die "unable 
+to open config file for write";
foreach (keys %config) {
  print CONFIGWRITE "[$_]\n";
  foreach (@{$config{$_}}) {
    print CONFIGWRITE $_;
    print CONFIGWRITE "\n";
  }
print CONFIGWRITE "\n";
}
close CONFIGWRITE;

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===== Or, to make it even simpler, how do I get this snippet to print out a copy of the config file: 
open (READ, "z:/test.txt") or die "unable to open file";

foreach (<READ>) {
  push @array, $_;
}
foreach (@array) {
  print $_;
}

[download]
If requested, I can make a sample of the source file available. ===== OK, further work, further progress. I've finally determined that if I read the file in with UTF-16LE encoding, I get the strings in usable form. But if I output the fule using :encoding(UTF-16LE) I'm back to having a space between every character. Is this because Perl uses UTF-8 internally? If so, do I maybe have to use Unicode::String to convert the strings before sending them back to the filehandle?

In reply to Reading and writing to unicode files by cbingel

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