Thanks! use UTF8 doesn't help, and I've added sample code to the original post...The output has an invisible character where the ASCII French character should be...

Hi, I hit a temporary glitch, then this started working for me. I don't know what to tell you. I suspect you have file encoding mismatches somewhere. When I download your code example, the œ dosn't show up in my editor or Tk. I then manually copy&pasted in œ from your html into the Tk program and it ran. Maybe some unicode guru knows the reason?

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Tk;
use Tk::TextUndo;
use utf8;

my $main = MainWindow->new;

my $middle = $main->Frame(-borderwidth=>2,-relief=>'groove')->grid(-ro
+w=>0,-column=>1,-sticky=>'nsew');

my $middlebox = $middle->TextUndo (
                      -font => 'arial 20',
                           -wrap => 'word',
                           -spacing2 => 10,
                           -spacing3 => 30,
                           -takefocus => 1,
                           -background => 'white',
                           -width => 70,
                           -height => 10,

                           )->grid(-row=>0, -column=>0, -sticky=>'nsew
+');

$middlebox->insert('end',"This is a test of the œ character\n");

print ord('œ'),"\n"; # prints 339
print chr(339),"\n"; 

$middlebox->insert('end', ord('œ') );
$middlebox->insert('end',"\n");
$middlebox->insert('end', chr(339) );

MainLoop;
[download]

---

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh

use Encode;

my $buf;
open (my $fh, "< slurp1");
read( $fh, $buf, -s FH );
close $fh;

my $file = decode('utf8', $buf);

# now just insert $file into the Tk::Text widget
[download]

Thanks so much for the suggestion. I tried that, with my test code, and now it says "This is a test of the ? character", with the ? in a black diamond...!

If I add "use UTF-8" at the top, I get an error when it hits that character saying "Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0x9c, with no preceding start byte) at..."

Finally, if I paste in the character from the Perlmonks page to my editor (komodo), it doesn't fix it for me...

Would love to hear any other thoughts!

use Encode;
use Tk;
use Tk::TextUndo;
my $main = MainWindow->new;

my $string = decode ('utf8', "This is a test of the œ character");

my $middle = $main->Frame(-borderwidth=>2,-relief=>'groove')->grid(-ro
+w=>0,-column=>1,-sticky=>'nsew');
my $middlebox = $middle->Text (
               -font => 'system 10',
                           -wrap => 'word',
                           -spacing2 => 10,
                           -spacing3 => 30,
                           -takefocus => 1,
                           -background => 'white',

                           -width => 70,
                           -height => 10,

                           )->grid(-row=>0, -column=>0, -sticky=>'nsew
+');#pack(-expand => 1, -fill => 'both');#;


$middlebox->insert('end',"$string");

MainLoop;
[download]

You say to perl your script is utf-8, but it is not. It contains 0x9c, which is cp1252 for "oe". So, use

use encoding 'cp1252';
[download]

instead, or save your file in utf-8.