I'm using osql to run several sql scripts against a database and then I need to look at the results file to check if any errors occurred. The problem is that perl doesn't seem to like the fact that the results files are unicode.

I wrote a little test script to test it and the output comes out all warbled.

$file = shift;

open OUTPUT, $file or die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
while (<OUTPUT>) {
    print $_;
    if (/Invalid|invalid|Cannot|cannot/) {
        push(@invalids, $file);
        print "invalid file - $inputfile - schedule for retry\n";
        last;
    }            
}

Any ideas? I've tried decoding using decode_utf8 but it makes no difference. I've also tried to set the encoding when opening the file.

I think the problem might be that osql puts the result file in UTF-16 format, but I'm not sure. When I open the file in textpad it just tells me 'Unicode'.

Edit: Using perl v5.8.8