This is a Mac charset problem. My terminal is UTF-8: 

$ echo -n ’|recode ..macintosh | xxd
0000000: e280 99                                  ...
$ echo `echo -n ’|recode ..macintosh`
’

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This means that when I take the mangled characters from "Ainsi j’appelle" and convert them to the traditional Mac charset, the resulting byte sequence interpreted as UTF-8 is an apostrophe. So the reverse must be the case for your file: you are assuming an 8-bit Mac charset but the file is actually UTF-8. Either convert the files by hand using recode or iconv, or use Encode::Guess or similar to detect the encoding on the fly.

In reply to Re: Unusual output with french accented letters by mbethke
in thread Unusual output with french accented letters by JHG

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