How can I output UTF-8 from Perl?

perl unicode utf-8
Peter Conrey picture Peter Conrey · Mar 9, 2009 · Viewed 122.8k times · Source

I am trying to write a Perl script using the "utf8" pragma, and I'm getting unexpected results. I'm using Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and I'm editing with TextMate. All of my settings for both my editor and operating system are defaulted to writing files in utf-8 format.

However, when I enter the following into a text file, save it as a ".pl", and execute it, I get the friendly "diamond with a question mark" in place of the non-ASCII characters.

#!/usr/bin/env perl -w

use strict;
use utf8;

my $str = 'Çirçös';
print( "$str\n" );

Any idea what I'm doing wrong? I expect to get 'Çirçös' in the output, but I get '�ir��s' instead.

Answer

Chris Lutz picture Chris Lutz · Mar 9, 2009

use utf8; does not enable Unicode output - it enables you to type Unicode in your program. Add this to the program, before your print() statement:

binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");

See if that helps. That should make STDOUT output in UTF-8 instead of ordinary ASCII.

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