Perl Unicode Cookbook: Decode Standard Filehandles as Locale Encoding

Apr 30, 2012 by Tom Christiansen

℞ 16: Declare `STD{IN,OUT,ERR}` to be in locale encoding

Always convert to and from your desired encoding at the edges of your programs. This includes the standard filehandles STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. While it may be most common for modern operating systems to support UTF-8 in filehandle settings, you may need to use other encodings.

Perl can respect your current locale settings for its default filehandles. Start by installing the Encode::Locale module from the CPAN.

    # cpan -i Encode::Locale
    use Encode;
    use Encode::Locale;

    # or as a stream for binmode or open
    binmode STDIN,  ":encoding(console_in)"  if -t STDIN;
    binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(console_out)" if -t STDOUT;
    binmode STDERR, ":encoding(console_out)" if -t STDERR;

The Encode::Locale module allows you to use “whatever encoding the attached terminal expects” for input and output filehandles attached to terminals. It also allows you to specify “whatever encoding the file system uses for file names”; see the documentation for more.

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Series Index: The Standard Preamble

Next: ℞ 17: Make File I/O Default to UTF-8

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unicode