I am trying to find my way around Unicode in perl. I want my scripts to have correct output no matter if they are called on latin1 or on utf8 terminals. I have already found the incredible useful use open OUT => ':locale'. However, I'm having trouble with commandline arguments. Is there a more sensible way than to do it this way: 
use charnames ':full';
use open ':locale';
use Encode;

for (PerlIO::get_layers(STDOUT)){
    if (/encoding\((.*)\)/ || /(utf8)/ ){
        $lc||=$1;
    }
}

print "Locale is: $lc\n";

$_="@ARGV"; $_=decode($lc,$_);

$_=~s<([^\x{000a}\x{0020}-\x{007e}])>{
    '\N{'.charnames::viacode(ord $1).'}'
}ge;

print $_,"\n";

[download]
This seems overly ugly, just to get perl to do the right thing.

In reply to unicode DWIM? by Sec

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.