The basic rule is that you need to decode your strings before you apply text operations (like uc) to them, and then encode them when you do IO with them (ie print to STDOUT or a file).

It also seems you're coming up with an extra-complicated way of writing ucfirst.

So a piece of code that handles accents in UTF-8 input correctly could look like this: 

# make sure that strings coming from STDIN are decoded:
binmode STDIN, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

# make sure that strings written to STDOUT are encoded:
binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

my $line = <STDIN>;
$line = ucfirst $line;

print $line;

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Please read the longer introduction for more background and information.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re: Accented letter is not capitalised by moritz
in thread Accented letter is not capitalised by Steve_BZ

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