dakkar, Firstly, thanks for the prompt reply. Secondly, it would appear my file in question does not appear to be using UTF-8. If I open it with MS Notepad and go to save, the default file type is simply 'unicode', UTF-8 appears a seperate option in the drop-down list. So I am guessing that Notepad may use UTF-16 or UCS-2 when selecting 'Unicode' (not sure what UCS-2 is but read that notepad uses this?). Do you know how I can find out how my file is encoded? I have tried specifying UTF-16 and UCS-2 as the IO layers with the open function but I get: Can't locate PerlIO/UTF.pm