I'm at a loss. Whenever I try to handle unicode/utf8 stuff in perl I hit a wall on how to do it in a sane way.

Please tell me that I'm missing something here.

My goals are:

Text read from stdin, written to stdout and arguments on the commandline should respect the current user locale.

Source code is in a fixed format (usually utf8) Files/pipes should be in the format I specify.

My example script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use open qw(:std :locale);

open (my $in,"-|:encoding(utf8)","echo \xc3\xb6") || die ;

my $line=<$in>;

chomp($line);

print "I read a line, that is ",length($line)," chars long.\n";

print "That line is: ",$line,"\n";
$line =~ s/ö/o/;
print "That line in ascii is: $line\n";
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Let's run it:

karoshi:~>LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 ./u8demo.pl
I read a line, that is 1 chars long.
That line is: ö
That line in ascii is: o
karoshi:~>LC_CTYPE=C ./u8demo.pl          
ascii "\xC3" does not map to Unicode at ./u8demo.pl line 12.
ascii "\xB6" does not map to Unicode at ./u8demo.pl line 12.
I read a line, that is 8 chars long.
That line is: \xC3\xB6
That line in ascii is: \xC3\xB6
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The second case fails horribly. I have no idea why. If I comment the "use open" line, it (of course) fails printing the umlauts on any utf-8 terminal

karoshi:~>./u8demo.pl
I read a line, that is 1 chars long.
That line is: �
That line in ascii is: o
[download]

Is there a way to get perl to "do the right thing"?