Hi :) I'm a complete newbie at Perl (having never done any programming at all before), but I've been having a lot of fun hacking away for the past coupla weeks. I've been trying to write some code that will scan HTML files for particular words, and then output the full sentences those words are in.

I've managed to get something that works perfectly - so far ;) - but, as I want it to scan multiple languages, I've tried to specify locales. I've followed instructions for using 'locale', but it hasn't worked, so I've had to specify accented words in the regex.

Here are a few excerpts from what I've done so far (I've 'elided' the irrelevant bits with ...):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use locale;
use POSIX(locale_h);

# query and save the old locale
$old_locale = setlocale(LC_CTYPE);

# set locale (doesn't work)
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "ISO8859");

print "Input word: ";
$word = <STDIN>;
chomp($word);

...

$fileNo = 1; # HTML filenames have already been converted to numbers (
+eg., 1.html etc)

while ($fileNo <= 610)
{
    open FH, "K:\\$fileNo.html" or die "Can't open: $!";
    open OUT, ">>K:\\sentences.txt";

#    print OUT "$fileNo.html\n";
#    print "$fileNo.html\n";

    $/ = ".";

    while (<FH>)
    {

...

#        if (/(^|\. ])([a-z0-9\,\:\;\"\' ]* $word[a-z0-9\,\:\;\"\'\. ]
+*)$/i) { # this one doesn't work!
        if (/(^|\. ])([a-záéíóúñü0-9\,\:\;\"\' ]* $word[a-záéíóúñü0-9\
+,\:\;\"\'\. ]*)$/i) {    # so I've had to do this instead!
            print OUT "\n$fileNo.html: $2\n";
            print "\n$fileNo.html: $2\n";
        }
    }
    close OUT;
    close FH;
    $fileNo++;
}
[download]

What am I doing wrong? I've downloaded the locale specifications and have tried es_ES, fr_FR etc, but still no luck. Excuse me if I've made a really elementary goof, but it's all been trial and error so far. Thanks, this seems like a great place to learn and share wisdom!
Best regs,
DoonYakka