(...) and almut's guess about it being big-endian turns out to be wrong, then it must be little-endian ("UTF-16LE").

Not exactly a 'guess' :)  Given the OP said that "0442043504410442" corresponds to the sample word "тест", it cannot really be little-endian, because that would be "4204350441044204".

Maybe it's worth noting that "UTF-16" with encode() assumes "BE"  (quote from Encode::Unicode):

"When BE or LE is omitted during encode(), it returns a BE-encoded string with BOM prepended.  So when you want to encode a whole text file, make sure you encode() the whole text at once, not line by line or each line, not file, will have a BOM prepended."

Of course, from the sample word alone we cannot tell whether a BOM is required.

In reply to Re^2: UTF8 to UTF16, but... by almut
in thread UTF8 to UTF16, but... by natol44

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