I don't think it's a UTF8 issue...

You're probably right; it looks more like an UTF-16 (a.k.a. Windows Unicode) issue. See Encode and Encode::Supported.

Try the following in your script: 

use Encode qw(from_to);
...
from_to( $_, 'UTF-16LE', 'latin-1') for @sorted;
 print FOUT join("\n", @sorted);

[download]

Change the 'latin-1' to the actual encoding you want.

In reply to Re: script inserts \x00 bytes on WinXP by shmem
in thread script inserts \x00 bytes on WinXP by dwhite20899

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