note Anonymous Monk <blockquote> <i> ...to trust that <c> :raw:perlio:encoding(UTF-16LE):crlf [download] </c> is the best, right way to handle Unicode text in Perl on Windows. </i> </blockquote> For older versions of Perl (<= 5.8.8), you'd need an additional <c>:utf8</c> layer at the end, i.e. <p> <c> :raw:perlio:encoding(UTF-16LE):crlf:utf8 </c> (although this isn't needed with newer versions, it doesn't do any harm either) <p> Without it, the strings would end up <i>without the utf8 flag</i> set (upon reading), which means that Perl wouldn't treat them as text/unicode strings in regex comparisons, etc., as it should. Similarly for writing. <p> <c> $ hd Input.txt 00000000 ff fe e4 00 62 00 63 00 0d 00 0a 00 |..ä.b.c.....| </c> <c> #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Devel::Peek; open my $input_fh, '<:raw:perlio:encoding(UTF-16):crlf', 'Input.txt'; my $line = <$input_fh>; chomp $line; Dump $line; </c> 5.8.8 output (wrong):<p> <c> SV = PV(0x69ae70) at 0x605000 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK) PV = 0x6778e0 "\303\244bc"\0 CUR = 4 LEN = 80 </c> Output with newer versions (correct): <p> <c> SV = PV(0x750cb8) at 0x777cc8 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8) PV = 0x86a070 "\303\244bc"\0 [UTF8 "\x{e4}bc"] CUR = 4 LEN = 80 </c> <p> This seems to be the only thing that's been fixed in the meantime. <p> I think this only goes to prove your point that this is way too arcane for mere mortals... And, even though there is a "solution" to the issue, the current behavior of the <c>:crlf</c> layer is definitely a bug, IMHO. For one, it violates the principle of least surprise. Instead, the following straightforward approach (as anyone sane in his mind would glean from the existing documentation) <i>should</i> work: <p> <c> open my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-16LE)', ... </c> 868428 868498 5