The easiest (for me) way to decide if your file is utf-16 or ucs-2 (see below) is to look at it, using something like:

C:\> more < thefile
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If you see something (like smileys, or whitespace) between each latin letter, it's either of the two encodings above, otherwise it isn't (this assumes you have latin letters in your file)

To read them: (I was not very clear)

open FILE,'<:encoding(utf-16)','filename';
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or whatever encoding you want. The :utf8 spec is a sort of shorthand for the full :encoding() spec...

ucs-2 is a degenerate form of Unicode encoding, since it can not represent character beyond the first 2^16. It is more-or-less compatible with utf-16 for those, so you might not notice the difference. Anyway, don't use to write new files (please ;-) )

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile