Re: replacing special characters in file

[Joost]

Perl used to only allow ASCII in identifiers, if you use you can "use utf8" in recent perls to indicate that you want to be able to use unicode identifiers.

String literals in perl can be in any encoding, but how they will look in your editor is dependent on the editor (and possibly on markings in the file). Most modern editors support UTF-8 unicode encoding, and I'd guess that most win32 editors support the win32 specific encodings too.

Input & output can be in many encodings, but in most cases, you need to specify what encoding you're going to use.

See perluniintro, binmode, utf8 and Encode.

[xdg]

I think Joost and polypompholyx are on the right track for the answer to this question, but it sounds like the OP is wrestling with character set challenges beyond just Perl, based on the description of "cutting/pasting" and "previewing". In essence, one needs Excel, the text editor, and the console (if that's where things are being printed) to all be "speaking" the same character encoding (and have a font that supports it, too) -- or at least one needs to take into account the differences between all these variables. Even if one gets the encodings right in Perl, the results could still look strange when viewed in some other program (console or editor). The OP will need to do more research into the unicode/character-code support of all the other links in the chain.