how do you identify if a file is utf8 in perl

[julian]

how do you identify if a file is utf8 in perl

 

[Dr.Ruud]

(e-mail address removed) schreef:

how do you identify if a file is utf8 in perl

There is no perfect way to do that, whether you use perl or any other
executable.

An ASCII file (all bytes 0-127) is also a UTF-8 file (and a utf8 file).

The Windows Notepad text editor prefixes a UTF-8 file with a
BOM-special U+FEFF, which leads to the initial bytes EF BB BF. See
http://www.unicode.org/book/ch13.pdf (13.6 Specials). So you could
check for that "signature".

You could also read the file, in an eval-block, with the utf8-layer
active, once from start to end (or some other limit), to check its
utf8-ness.

See also perluniintro and perlunicode.