note remiah <p> Here I suppose the LDAP module that returns last name, gives you "decoded utf8 string". What do you see in log.txt file? and any warning message? <code> my $lastname=''; #here put the return value of LDAP open( my $fh, ">:encoding(UTF-8)", "log.txt") or die $!; print $fh utf8::is_utf8($lastname) ? 'utf8 flagged,' : 'not utf8 flagged,'; print $fh $lastname; close $fh; </code> </p> <p> <pre> Some string (in this case LDAP) | LDAP module? | <--- here LDAP returns what? is important information perl | utf8 text </pre> Do you see the manual of LDAP module has 'encoding' or 'binmode' section for this information? </p> 989377 989629