If I compose a short line of text in my gedit (Linux equivalent for Notepad).

and I use the simple code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# legaget.pl

use strict;

my $filename = "ligatext.txt";

open FILE, "<", $filename or die $1;

while( my $line = <FILE> ) {
    
    print $line;

}

close(FILE);
[download]

My terminal does in fact show those ligatures. However, to grab a webpage.html off the web, that I might add is not W3.org compliant; they don't use the meta line encoding='iso-xxxx-x'> The browser shows the ligatures, the file saved of that webpage will show the ligatures in gedit word processor, but... the same code above will throw in the < ? > symbol with print to Terminal.

I might add I have fought this same thing with MSWord files, as MS puts the Unicode country code in the first byte of their Word.doc format as a hex.

Yes, I've read binmode <STDOUT> description, they don't show an example. Can you give me a short snippet, let me try it???? Maybe, Open a file, read a line at a time to print to Terminal?

If you show the output from

hexdump -C your-file-with-ligatures.txt
[download]

We can determine the encoding of you.

What I meant with binmode is that instead of

use open ":encoding(UTF-8)";
[download]

Try

binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
[download]

Also I recommend to read up on Encodings, Unicode and how Perl handles them.

hexdump -C etest.txt
00000000  57 65 72 20 42 61 72 62  61 72 61 20 6c 69 76 65  |Wer Barba
+ra live|
00000010  20 65 72 6c 65 62 65 6e  20 6d c3 b6 63 68 74 65  | erleben 
+m..chte|
00000020  2c 20 68 61 74 20 69 6e  20 4d c3 bc 6e 63 68 65  |, hat in 
+M..nche|
00000030  6e 20 69 6d 6d 65 72 20  77 69 65 64 65 72 20 64  |n immer w
+ieder d|
00000040  69 65 20 47 65 6c 65 67  65 6e 68 65 69 74 2c 20  |ie Gelege
+nheit, |
00000050  73 69 65 20 73 69 6e 67  65 6e 20 7a 75 20 68 c3  |sie singe
+n zu h.|
00000060  b6 72 65 6e 2e 20 42 65  73 6f 6e 64 65 72 65 20  |.ren. Bes
+ondere |
00000070  41 75 66 74 72 69 74 74  65 20 77 65 72 64 65 20  |Auftritte
+ werde |
00000080  69 63 68 20 61 62 20 73  6f 66 6f 72 74 20 69 6d  |ich ab so
+fort im|
00000090  20 41 6e 73 63 68 6c 75  c3 9f 20 61 6e 20 64 69  | Anschlu.
+. an di|
000000a0  65 20 45 6e 67 65 6c 77  6f 72 74 65 20 61 6e 6b  |e Engelwo
+rte ank|
000000b0  c3 bc 6e 64 69 67 65 6e  2e 0a 0a                 |..ndigen.
+..|
000000bb
[download]

The above is a cut-n-paste from the webpage.html -- both the html and the txt show the same missing characters.

I did read several things about UTF-8. I suppose the confusion lies in => if I create the file, I get my Latin-1. If I didn't create the file, there is only ASCII.