Perl generally handles UTF-8 and Unicode very well, but there's a limit: file names. Linux doesn't have an encoding-aware API for file name operations, so it's not really perl's fault.

That being said, the normal approach is to decode the data from the outside world into text strings, work with it, and encode it back to byte strings before you print it or perform operations on the file system.

However, if file names and input data have the same encoding, everything (except some string operations like substr and regex matches) should work just fine. Which suggests that some of your data or file names have a different encoding than the system default of UTF-8.

There's a lot to say about it, and I already said much here. There's also perluniintro, the excellent Encode module (it's a core module), and perlunicode.

In reply to Re: encoding problem om Ubuntu Linux by moritz
in thread encoding problem om Ubuntu Linux by j.goor

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.