Dear monks, A million thanks for your help so far. I have taken the most practical advice given here and have added the two lines regarding encoding into the program. An illustrative program with the text I am trying to parse are included below. I am working in a windows environment, and use the dos prompt to call the script and .txt file that the above text is saved as. Unfortunately, the problem remains. Any further suggestions? 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use open IN  => ':encoding(cp1252)';
use open OUT => ':utf8';
use Getopt::Std;
our ($opt_f);
getopts('f:');
if($opt_f){
    openFile ("$opt_f");   
    while (my $line = <FILE>) {    
        chomp ($line);

#the following line illustrates that what is being
#read in is transformed from the original text

                print $line;
                
#if the part in the reg exp below "(État)" is removed, then
#the reg exp matches and $1 is printed correctly, but not 
#with this kept in there
 
 if ($line=~ /Number\s+of\s+Observations\s+Used\s+(\d+)\s+(État)/){
        print "$1";
        print "$2";
}
}
}

[download]
Here is a small illustrative piece of text I am trying to parse using the -f option: 
Le Système SAS                       243
                                    09:11 Monday, October 29, 2007

                       The PHREG Procedure

                   Informations sur le modèle

           Data Set                 WORK.PSEUDOCONTSAS
           Dependent Variable       time
           Censoring Variable       affstat
           Censoring Value(s)       0
           Ties Handling            DISCRETE


             Number of Observations Read        1162
             Number of Observations Used         332


                        État de convergence

[download]

In reply to Re^2: French Accents in perl by audoushka
in thread French Accents in perl by audoushka

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