First of all, there's small bug in your code. When you pass content of the file through decoding process (via 'encoding' directive), you get "characters". You should not pass those characters to STDOUT, because by default it expects "octets" instead of "characters". Well, it kinda works if your text contains only English alphabet, but it won't work properly for other characters.
Second, your question is not clear. In the second block of code you use '$currentline', which is also used in the first block, is it the same variable, or different one? Maybe you can provide real block of code that produces problems, then it would be possible to see where you make mistake. Otherwise, as already recommended, try to read 'perldoc Encode'.
