The important question is how the MailSweeper files are encoded. "Unicode" is not an answer to that question because there are multiple, completely different encodings for Unicode characters to bytes. Perl uses UTF-8 internally for Unicode strings. UTF-16 stores Unicode characters as 2-bytes. Windows will use UTF-16 for text files.

If you are getting an extra byte between ASCII characters, then the file is most likely using UTF-16. Try this: 

open (CONFIGREAD, "<:encoding(UTF-16)", $fileaddrlist)

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In reply to Re: Reading and writing to unicode files by iburrell
in thread Reading and writing to unicode files by cbingel

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