This was posted to comp.lang.perl.misc with no replies. Hello, I'm trying to understand the correct way to handle the following. Say I have a file containing non ascii characters, e.g. as 8 bit values 66 69 6C E9, or 'f' 'i' 'l' 'e_acute', and I want to establish whether that file exists. If I execute: 
ex("c:\\fil\x{e9}.txt");
ex("c:\\fil" . pack("U", 0xe9 ) . ".txt");

sub ex {
    my $f = shift;
    print $f;
    print ((-e $f) ? " exists" : " doesn't exist");
    print "\n";
}

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Then I get the following: 
c:\filé.txt exists
c:\filé.txt doesn't exist

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The filename is displayed in exactly the same format to the screen in both cases, but the file isn't found when the filename is passed as a utf8 string. Is there any way to tell perl that the operand being passed to -e is utf8? One workaround would be to simply convert everything from utf8 to an single byte representation, but I've no idea whether this will work in environments other than mine (Win32, EN_GB, perl v5.8.8). It's also not going to handle unicode characters that won't fit into a single byte either. What is the correct way to handle this to ensure portability? Chris Key

In reply to utf8 filenames by cjk32

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