Reading Cyrillic characters from file in perl

Question

I'm having trouble reading Cyrillic characters from a file in perl.

The text file is written in Notepad and contains "абвгдежзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъьюя". Here's my code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

open FILE, "text.txt" or die $!;

while (<FILE>) {
    print $_;   
}

If I save the text file using the ANSI encoding, I get:

рстуфхцчшщъыьэюяЁёЄєЇїЎў°∙·№■

If I save it using the UTF-8 encoding, and I use the function decode('UTF-8', $_) from the package Encode, I get:

Wide character in print at test.pl line 11, <TEXT> line 1.

and a bunch of unreadable characters.

I'm using the command prompt in windows 7x64

What's encoding was used for the file? What encoding does your terminal use? — ikegami, Feb 02 '13 at 15:47
Type `chcp` and prepend `cp` to the number obtained to get the answer to my second question. (e.g. `cp437` for me.) What about my first question? — ikegami, Feb 02 '13 at 15:50
First question: I try 2 encodings 8-bit ansi and utf-8. Second question cp866 — Daniel Rusev, Feb 02 '13 at 15:54
[cp1252](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cp1252) doesn't have cyrilic chars. ("Windows-1252" and "cp1252" are the same thing. Perl accepts either name. Same goes for 1251.) — ikegami, Feb 02 '13 at 16:02

ikegami · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-02T16:05:53.953

You're decoding your inputs, but "forgot" to encode your outputs.

Your file is probably encoded using cp1251.

Your terminal expects cp866.

Use

use open ':std', ':encoding(cp866)';
use open IO => ':encoding(cp1251)';
open(my $FILE, '<', 'text.txt')
   or die $!;

or

use open ':std', ':encoding(cp866)';
open(my $FILE, '<:encoding(cp1251)', 'text.txt')
   or die $!;

Use :encoding(UTF-8) instead of :encoding(cp1251) if you saved as UTF-8.

1 Answers1