1 #!/usr/bin/perl
  2
  3 use strict;
  4 use warnings;
  5
  6 use Data::Dumper;
  7
  8 system( 'touch èåäö' );
  9
 10 open( DEMO, '<', 'èåäö' )
 11   or die "Cannot open file èåäö: $!\n"

When you read a string from STDIN (or other file handles) in perl, it is handled as binary data. So if the input is in the same character encoding as the file name, it should work. If not, you can try to recode it into the appropriate encoding using [mod://Encode}::from_to.

To do that, you have to know both the character encoding of the input encoding (depending on operating system, possible locales, and the terminal or GUI toolkit you're using) and the output encoding (depending on OS, file system and the API used to interface the OS).

With the sparse informations you've given us we can't guess any of those, and even if you tell us more, in the end you're the only one who can really find out what you need to do.

For a general introduction you can read about character encodings and perl, perluniintro and perlunifaq. None of those will give you a read-made solution, but reading these documents will make you aware of the possibilities and pitfalls.

Hello again,

Sorry for the lack of details in my question. I am running on WinXP with ActivePerl 5.10.0 build 1004. What I'm doing in my program is to let the user specify a file path using an open dialog and then I try to open the file. The code is appended below.

$data_file = Tkx::tk___getOpenFile(-parent => $mw, -filetypes => [['Da
+ta file', '.txt']],-initialdir => "$path\\work\\");
open(DATA_FILE, $data_file);
@data = <DATA_FILE>;
close(DATA_FILE);
[download]

When I do this for a file path containing special characters (for example å,ä and ö, surely more characters will cause problems) the open command failes. Hope this gives you a little more information to work with :)

As I said before, it's unlikely that we can solve the problem for you. You have to work with it.

You should check the Tkx documentation to see what kind of string that dialog returns (a decoded text string, or not), and then consult the documentation of Encode and decide what you have to do with it.

Read the links I gave you earlier. You have to understand what's going on to get it working.

If you are on windows, this trick worked for me recently:

C:\test>perl -wle"open O, qq[| perl -pe1 > \"è or å,ä,ö\" ]; print O f
+or 1..10"

C:\test>type "è or å,ä,ö"
1
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10
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Not a great demo, but the basic idea is to use cmd.exe, which unlike perl these days, knows how to handle wide char sets, to create the file (assuming you looking to create it, not read a pre-existing file).

If you're looking to read a pre-existing file you can do a similar trick using the read-from version of the piped open:

C:\test>perl -we"open O, qq[ type \"è or å,ä,ö\" | ]; print while <O>"
1
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Please show some code! Is this a web application? Maybe some decoding in ASCII takes place? I'm pretty sure Perl can handle your Swedish characters. Are you sure it's a Perl problem?

my $filename = 'è or å,ä,ö';

for my $char (split '', $filename) {
    printf ("%02x ", ord($char));
}
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