Re^3: Text File Encoding under Windows

What is the desired (or required) output encoding, i.e. which program are you using to view or further process the output? (can it handle UTF-16?)

What special characters are involved; may they also be represented in a non-unicode legacy encoding such as ISO-8859-1 (ISO-Latin1) or Windows CP1252?

Maybe just try other output encodings

open OUTPUT, ">:encoding(UTF-8)", ...
open OUTPUT, ">:encoding(CP1252)", ...
open OUTPUT, ">:encoding(ISO-8859-1)"...
...
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The latter two should be used in combination with :encoding(UTF-16) on the input side, because that would swallow the BOM, which you don't want in non-unicode output (in case of UTF-8 the BOM is optional, so you can decide for yourself).

P.S.: can you view the original input file correctly with the same program that's showing the empty boxes with the output file? (btw, do you really mean "line" in "a line of empty boxes in every second line", or rather character "column"? — the former would be kinda strange...)

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Re^4: Text File Encoding under Windows by pat_mc (Pilgrim) on Mar 18, 2010 at 14:49 UTC
Thanks, almut - This was very helpful! I managed to find out that UTF-8 output encoding in fact worked fine and all the special characters displayed correctly. The application operating on the modified files (of which I did not know which encoding it required) accepted the input thus created. Thanks again for your help! Problem resolved. Cheers - Pat	[reply]