I don't have any way to test in an environment that matches yours, but based on what you've posted so far, it would appear that your locale settings and non-ascii file names are "consistent" -- both involve a single-byte-per-character encoding for "vanilla" European (8859-1, i.e. Latin-1).

So your Encode::decode call should specify that the string being passed to it needs to be decoded from that encoding: 

my $file = decode( 'iso-8859-1', $file );

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Try that and see if it helps. The return value should be a valid utf8 string with the accented "e" rendered as intended, because the value being passed in $file is a valid 8859-1 string.

When you passed 'utf-8' as the first arg to decode(), perl was being told to expect utf8 data in $file, but the single non-ascii byte there was not parsable as utf8, and what you got in place of it was the unicode "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER" (U+FFFD), which, when rendered as utf8 data, is the three-byte sequence "0xef 0xbf 0xbd", and that sequence, when played through a Latin-1 display window, yields the three goofy characters that you got.

In reply to Re^3: Tk and Non-ASCII File Names by graff
in thread Tk and Non-ASCII File Names by eff_i_g

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