categorized answer QandAEditors <p>[mod://File::BOM] provides <c>get_encoding_from_filehandle</c> and <c>get_encoding from_stream</c> to identify the encoding of Unicode files. Example:</p> <code> use File::BOM qw( :all ); open $fh, '<', $filename; my ($encoding) = get_encoding_from_filehandle($fh); </code> 256728