The bytes you are skipping form character U+FEFF, the Byte-order mark. Use UCS-2 instead of UCS-2le and it will skip the character for you.

The wide character warning is issued because you outputting decoded characters without encoding them (loosely speaking). Fix: 

# Encode output.
# Use the encoding that's appropriate for you.
binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

my $lines;
{
   # Decode input.
   open my $log_fh, "<:encoding(UCS-2)", $file
      or die($!);
   local $/ = undef;
   $lines = <LOGFILE>;
}

print "...\n", $lines, "...\n";

[download]

On unix, you can do use open ':std', ':locale'; to set the "correct" encoding for STDOUT, but it doesn't work on Windows :(

If I did not skip the first two byes, [...] "$lines = <LOGFILE>" would only capture a few characters out of a 1088 character file.

You are mistaken.

If Perl should have handled the UCS-2LE file without needing to include the encoding or the skipping of bytes

Perl has no way of knowing the encoding of a file, or even if it's a text file for that matter.

If the IDrive log files might be a non-standard or corrupted UCS-2LE

Why do you ask that?

There are some byte combination that aren't allowed in UCS-2*. Encountering them is fatal. 

$ perl -e'open $fh, "<:encoding(UCS-2le)", \"\x00\xD8"; <$fh>'
UCS-2LE:no surrogates allowed d800 at -e line 1.

[download]

In reply to Re: Problems Handling UCS-2LE by ikegami
in thread Problems Handling UCS-2LE by Ecurb

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.