We have a database dump that is (mostly) in iso-8859-01 or more likely in windows 1252. The database was populated by a web form that encouraged browsers to give us text in these charsets because it's head section included: 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
+">

[download]

...and Internet Exploder interprets iso-8859-01 as license to give you Windows 1252

We are converting to utf-8 , becasue it is clearer and better supports non-English characters

The somewhat simplified code is 

  use Encode qw(from_to);

  binmode DATA, ':utf8';
  my $original=<DATA>;
  my $converted=$original;

  from_to($converted,'iso-8859-01','utf-8');
  from_to($converted,'utf-8','iso-8859-01');

  print $converted eq $original?'round trip ok':'changed'; 
__DATA__
some chars that in reality aren't all low ascii

[download]

Our problem is that our utf-8 output doesn't show up correctly in the terminal. As near as we can tell from the  locale command and the Terminal->Set Character encoding menu item in gnome-terminal

For example, some of our converted output in utf8 contains a bunch of 0xC2 and 0xC3 (194 & 195) chars

 perl -e 'binmode STDOUT,":utf8"; print chr(0xC2),"\n";'

[download]

...Gives a LATIN CAPITAL A WITH CIRCUMFLEX (according to gnome-character-map), which is not in the input.

maybe we don't know what char set the input is in?

UPDATE: set binmode per Anonymous Friend

In reply to display of utf8 by omacneil

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