"Wide Character format" most likely means it's encoded using UCS-2le. You're treating it as if it was encoded using iso-latin-1. Just decode it.

open(my $log_fh, '<:encoding(UCS-2le)', $log_qfn)
   or die("Can't open log file \"$log_qfn\": $!\n");
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Thanks a bunch, ikegami, this worked!! :)

Currently I am trying this, which is not working- " $product = $ARGV[0]; $file = $ARGV1; system("type $file > templog.txt"); open(A, "templog.txt") || die "can't open intput file"; while() { $linein = $_; print $linein; } " Which is printing the wide character string. Not sure, how do I open using the open(my $log_fh, '<:encoding(UCS-2le)', $log_qfn) and still read it line by line?

How many spaces are there between each word? If there are more than one, you can simply s/ //; - I think.

Update: Oh, whoops. I meant s/(\w*) (\w+)/$1$2/g. Err, that is what I saw in my head, just not what I typed. Thanks, JadeNB.