Thanks, almut -

This solved part of the problem. The file is now getting read in OK and the expected regex matches occur. However, the output is still causing problem because the non-ASCII characters in it do not get represented correctly. I have tried the following two approaches:

1) Printing out to the DOS console and redirecting the output from there into a file. The result looks fine - if it were not for the special characters that get represented as EF,FC etc.

2) Printing to a UTF-16 encoded file with the following code: 
#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use locale;
open INPUT, "<:encoding(UTF-16LE)", $ARGV[0];
open OUTPUT, ">:encoding(UTF-16LE)", "./Output_UTF-16";

while ( <INPUT> )
{
    # long list of regex-based replacements

    print OUTPUT $_;
}

[download]
The result was an output file which represented all special characters correctly but contained a line of empty boxes in every second line.

Can you please advise what I need to do to fix both output variants?

Thanks again for your help!
Pat

In reply to Re^2: Text File Encoding under Windows by pat_mc
in thread Text File Encoding under Windows by pat_mc

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