use strict;
use warnings;

my $file_in = '...';
my $file_out = '...';

open(my $fh_in, '<:raw:encoding(UCS-2LE)', $file_in)
   or die("Unable to open \"$file_in\": $!\n");

open(my $fh_out, '>:raw:encoding(UCS-2LE)', $file_out)
   or die("Unable to create file \"$file_out\": $!\n");

while (<$fh_in>) {
   ...

   print $fh_out $_;
}
[download]

Update: Oops, originally confirmed that it was UTF-16LE.

Glad you corrected this - I'm not that proficient on Windows ;-)

I wonder about the leading sequence 0xff 0xfe in notepad saved text files - is that some marker indicating the encoding type?

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

Glad you corrected this - I'm not that proficient on Windows ;-)

UCS-2 and UTF-16 are practically identical. The former is fixed width (like iso-latin-1) and the latter is variable width (like UTF-8). The pros and cons for using UTF-8 over iso-latin-1 also apply to using UTF-16 over UCS-2.

Windows uses UCS-2LE. Not knowing anything about UCS-2 'til today, I've been blindly using UTF-16LE.

I wonder about the leading sequence 0xff 0xfe in notepad saved text files - is that some marker indicating the encoding type?

It's a Byte Order Mark (BOM).

I wonder about the leading sequence 0xff 0xfe in notepad saved text files - is that some marker indicating the encoding type?

It's called the "byte order mark" (BOM), and is used to detect the little or big-endianness (?) of the data in the file.

See BOM.

---

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