Thank you both for your replies, although they did not solve my problem.

I kept searching and solved it simply like this:

use Encode;
use Encode::Escape;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;

...

while ($line = <IN>) {
    $strut = from_json($line);
    print decode('unicode-escape', Dumper($strut)) . "\n";
}
[download]

This now gives me the output I need, which is the accented chars displayed as they are, since the output is to be redirected to a text file and read by humans on a regular text editor.

Thank you all once again.

And why isn’t the JSON data enough? JSON has a pretty option, which would pretty-print the data for you, not requiring you to (ab)use Dumper.

Keep in mind, that any JSON data generated by JSON is a byte stream and not a (Unicode) string.

• To print it in a terminal you should decode it into a string and tell Perl your terminal is UTF-8, as suggested above. Sending byte streams to terminals is a bad thing, definitely don’t do that.
• To print it into a file,
  • you might be best off with a file that you opened as a binary (open my $FH, '>:raw', "myfilename.txt"). Any byte thrown at a raw file will appear there as intended.
  • Or of course, you can decode it into a string, print it into the file, Perl will know that it’s a string and either figure out the byte stream format (aka. encoding) for the file, or you should be specifying one, eg. '>:encoding(UTF-8)'. Letting Perl do it for you is not necessarily a good idea :)

Yes, fully aware it looks extremely complicated :)

Ah, cp1252, how retro!

Still, in the end, the process mangles perfectly viable characters that are by no means special to node syntax, and that’s just bad.