perl5.md

Encoded I/O in Perl 5

All I/O is treated as binary data by default and input as byte strings. These examples set I/O as UTF-8 encoded data, decode it to character strings on input, and encode on output.

All streams

All standard streams and filehandles. This does not include command-line arguments.

use open qw( :encoding(UTF-8) :std );

Alternately, individual streams and filehandles can be handled as follows.

Standard streams

binmode STDIN,  ':encoding(UTF-8)';
binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
binmode STDERR, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

Existing filehandles

binmode $fh, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

New filehandles

open my $in_fh,  '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $path;
open my $out_fh, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', $path;

Command-line arguments

use Encode;

@args = map { decode('UTF-8', $_) } @ARGV;