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.