Folks, I'm trying to understand how Unicode works in Perl 5.8.7, and things are not working the way they're described in perluniintro. In particular, I have a file encoded in UTF-8 from Perl, that I want to convert to Windows Unicode (UCS-16LE). The intro provides this snippet for converting from one character set to another: open(my $nihongo, '<:encoding(iso2022-jp)', 'text.jis'); open(my $unicode, '>:utf8', 'text.utf8'); while (<$nihongo>) { print $unicode } When I try that, substituting UTF-8 and ':encoding(UTF-16LE)', I get no warnings, but the output has twice as many characters as it should have and they are all NULLs. I can supply a my UTF-8 file if anyone wants to have a try. In particular, I think the fact that I have embedded apostrophes (0x27) encoded as RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (0x2019) may be part of the problem. Thanks, Skip