There are a few problems with that version of the script as posted:

• You should have just used a normal "open" statement instead of calling a subroutine that isn't defined.

• In my case at least (perl 5.8.6), the use open OUT => ":utf8" has no effect on the setting of STDOUT (which is already open when the script starts); I would use binmode STDOUT, ":utf8"

• You are reading the data file one line at a time, but your regex is trying to match a pattern that spans two lines, so the regex can never match successfully; you would either use two separate matches (one for each line), or else slurp the whole file into a single scalar in a single read operation (but that would change a lot of things).

Here's a version that prints the matches, and the output is definitely valid utf8. If the results look wrong when you run it, that probably means you are using a display window that does not support utf8 characters.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;

our ($opt_f);
getopts('f:');
if($opt_f){
    open( FILE, "<:encoding(cp1252)", $opt_f);
    binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
    while (my $line = <FILE>) {
        chomp ($line);

        print "$line\n";

        if ($line=~ /Number\s+of\s+Observations\s+Used\s+(\d+)/ or
            $line=~ /(État)/){
            print "$1\n";
        }
    }
}
[download]

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.