Hi, Here are my codes ############################

use Encode;

$text = @ARGV[0];

#here i read a string from command line

$string = decode("gb2312",$text);

#decode the input with gb2312, which is decided by my local setting

@chars = split //,$string;

open(OUTPUT,">>anUTF8File.txt");

foreach $char (@chars)

{

print OUTPUT encode("utf8",$char);

#i encode it into utf8 here

#and write it to the utf8 formatted file

}

close(OUTPUT);

############################

when I input english string in the command, this works fine. then i changed my keyboard to German type and type some German characters for the ARGV[0], then what was written to the file were some strange characters like "?" or others.