I spent most of last week wading/stumbling through a conversion of a large part of my system to UTF-8. After much reading and inexplicableness, I'm virtually there. Still have one problem though; one routine expects UTF-8 data and can crash if it gets some from a non-UTF-8 file. So I need to test a file for UTF-8-edness. I have read much documentation/Perlmonks/Stackoverflow and apparently the following should work:

open (ORDERFILE, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $emailfile) or return (@err, "Co
+uld not open order email file: $emailfile");
my(@LINES) = <ORDERFILE>;
my $filedata = <ORDERFILE>;
close(ORDERFILE);
use Encode;
eval { my $utf8 = decode("utf8", $filedata, Encode::FB_CROAK ) };
return(@err, "File was not encoded in UTF-8") if ($@);
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But I have ANSII files for which this doesn't return but just outputs lots of warnings such as: utf8 "\xA3" does not map to Unicode. If I remove the '<:encoding(UTF-8)', argument from 'open', it still works but there are no warnings. A salient insight would be a welcome relief if there are any ideas?