First, it's probably a good idea to upgrade your Perl, if anyhow possible. In particular, if you need unicode support. For one, 5.6.1 had quite a different approach to unicode internally than current 5.8 versions. Secondly, it's rather ancient anyway, so you're less likely to receive community help with problems that are specific to 5.6.   Just as an example, the binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; mentioned by Errto does not work in 5.6 (you'd get an "Unknown discipline ':utf8' ..." error).

Apart from that, it would be interesting to know in what encoding you have specified your greek 'y' in $string1. Depending on that, you probably want to add a use encoding ... directive (also 5.8, btw) to tell Perl how to parse literal strings, regexes, etc. in the script itself (e.g. use encoding 'utf8'; if the script is encoded in UTF-8).

In reply to Re: Strange behaviour with utf8 and wide chars by almut
in thread Strange behaviour with utf8 and wide chars by isync

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.