I've tried variously, use utf8; use various encodings but my matches don't capture the strings I'm seeking.
You must not have tried the most appropriate encoding (IMO), namely UCS-2, and most likely, this being Windows, it's Little Endian (UCS-2LE): the plain ASCII/Latin-1/Windows-1252 character comes first, the null byte comes next.

But grandfather is most likely right, you're trying to find Unicode strings inside a binary file, so treating the whole file as 16-bit Unicode, using binmode or open to set the encoding of the filehandle to 'ucs2le', for example using 

    open IN, '<:encoding(ucs2le)', $file

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may likely fail, as characters needn't necessarily start at the even file positions in the binary file.

So you could try grandfather's approach, which is a very sensible one, or you could do the inverse, and convert the strings you're searching for into UCS-2LE, and search the binary file using that.

Actually, I suspect that if indeed Unicode strings start at odd file (or buffer) positions, grandfathers method will fail to find them.

BTW A plain Perl, non Encode way to convert plain Latin-1 to UCS-2LE is using pack/unpack: 

    $ucs2 = pack 'v*', unpack 'C*', $text;

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In reply to Re: regular expression searching in binary files by bart
in thread regular expression searching in binary files by dhlocker

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