Hi
I understand that a unicode string is a set of symbols and that utf-8 is a way of saving these symbols as a a set of bytes - a way of encoding unicode. I understand also that "use utf8;" tells perl to interpret the perl file being read as being encoded using utf8 and containing unicode symbols.

I'm using the method HTML::Strip() to extract text from a website. I then wish to print out this text in my terminal window. This terminal window is currently the console window in Eclipse on the Mac Os X Platform.

First question. If I call a function, how do I know if it returns a unicode string or not. How can I get HTML::Strip() to return a unicode string? How is a unicode string encoded (utf8 or 16 etc?)

Second question. If I have a unicode string, how do I output it to my console window so that it appears correctly? Am I right in saying that my console window has its own encoding and that I must probably convert from utf8 (if thats how perl saves unicode) to my console windows encoding? How do I know what encoding my console window uses? If my console uses latin-1, then I will need to reencode the unicode string from utf-8 to latin-1, where all symbols outside those defined for latin-1 become a "?", right?

Thanks for your advice!

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