That sounds plausible, but hopefully an unicode expert like graff will weigh in. ( Maybe private msg graff and ask him to look at it? ) I'm a provincial american, who seldoms deals with non-ascii filenames. :-)

I would first try reading the directories and printing the list to a Tk text box, and see if there is any name changes.

So your Encode::decode call should specify that the string being passed to it needs to be decoded from that encoding:

my $file = decode( 'iso-8859-1', $file );
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When you passed 'utf-8' as the first arg to decode(), perl was being told to expect utf8 data in $file, but the single non-ascii byte there was not parsable as utf8, and what you got in place of it was the unicode "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER" (U+FFFD), which, when rendered as utf8 data, is the three-byte sequence "0xef 0xbf 0xbd", and that sequence, when played through a Latin-1 display window, yields the three goofy characters that you got.

graff,

Thanks for your input. I tried decode but I'm still error-ridden; I've included the updates below. Any other ideas or encoding tricks where I can see what's going on under the hood?

Command Line Output:

06_Protection_de_la_tête.xml: No such file or directory
No such file or directory
Assuming 'require Tk::ExecuteCommand;' at ./tmp.pl line 24
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Tk Output:

06_Protection_de_la_tête.xml: No such file or directory
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Code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Tk;
use File::Find::Rule;
use Encode qw(decode);

#my $file = '06_Protection_de_la_tête.xml';
my @files = File::Find::Rule->file->name('*.xml')->in('.');
my $file = shift @files;
$file = decode('iso-8859-1', $file);

my $cmd = "ls -l $file";

### Try ls.
print qx($cmd);

### Try reading the first line.
open my $F, '<', $file;
print $! ? "$!\n" : scalar <$F> ;

### Try ls via Tk.
my $mw = MainWindow->new;
my $exec = $mw->ExecuteCommand(
    -command => $cmd,
)->pack;
$exec->execute_command;
$exec->update;

MainLoop;
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In case you didn't know, the strings you just posted as the "Command Line Output" and "Tk Output" both contain a valid utf8 character ("e with circumflex"); it looks bad because both your shell terminal window and your Tk window are using iso-8859-1 encoding to display the data; the two "wrong" characters that you see are actually the two bytes of the utf8-encoded character, being interpreted as separate 8859-1 characters instead.

Having the string in utf8 encoding probably explains why the open() fails as well -- you've actually "changed" the file name (the value of $file), by changing the encoding.

So, I'm a little confused about the nature of the original problem... What happens if you take this most recent instance of your code (using File::Find::Rule), and comment out this line?

$file = decode('iso-8859-1', $file );
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