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.

The snippet you show is encoded in UTF-8.

Next step: determine the encoding of the file in which umlauts display correctly on your terminal.

Or even better: configure a clean UTF-8 enivronment.

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.

I'm confused indeed. If you don't create a file, it doesn't exist, neither with ASCII nor with UTF-8.

Speaking of confusion, I think you try to achieve too much in one step. For example the title of your question metions HTML::Parser, which doesn't appear in the posting at all.

So, small steps:

• Make sure you know which encoding your terminal understands. There's no point in proceeding before you have done this step.
• Find out what encodings your source files are. Seems to be UTF-8.
• In your perl scripts, decode everything coming from the outside (except when a module does it for you), and encode everything. use utf8;, and write your program files in UTF-8.
• If something doesn't work, find out where you violate any of the points of the previous steps.
Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

Okay, this DOES work...

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

use strict;

use Encode;

my $filename = "engleword.html";


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

while( my $line = <FILE> ) {
    
    print encode( "utf8",$line);

}

close(FILE);
[download]

What I have learned...

• use utf8; is for Unicode source code, filenames, deals with legacy stuff, not for encoding.
• I still have to grab the html and write to a file, I would still like to encode the string in place. Maybe later.

I have come across this encode problem as a graphic artist. Customers used MSWord to generate text and then pasted the resulting text into html, or Adobe Pagemaker, PDF, etc. and everything is just hunky-dory on a WinBox, but on a Mac or Linux the results had missing characters. MS was late adopting Unicode. MS thought they had another answer with OpenType (I think it was) a fonts technology in partnership with Adobe. That fell apart. But in pre-XP MS text products the first byte set the encode for the text file. I used to have a FreeWare program on the PC that manually changed that byte.

Forgive me, I worked on this silly problem all day, but I'm loving Perl.