Problem

VerbatimOut from the “fancyvrb” package doesn’t play nicely with UTF-8 characters.

Minimal working example:

\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}

\begin{document}
\begin{VerbatimOut}{\jobname.test}
é
\end{VerbatimOut}

\input{\jobname.test}
\end{document}

Error message

When compiled using pdflatex mini, this gives the error

File ended while scanning use of \UTFviii@three@octets.

A different error occurs when the sole occurrence of é above is replaced by something else, e.g. é */:

Package inputenc Error: Unicode char \u8:### not set up for use with LaTeX.

– indicating that in this case, LaTeX succeeds in reading a multi-byte UTF-8 character, but not knowing what to do with it (i.e. it’s the wrong character).

In fact, when I open the produced .test file manually, it contains the character é, but in Latin-1 encoding!

Proof: when I open the files in a hex editor, I get the following:

• Original file: C3 A9 (corresponds to LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE in UTF-8)
• Written file: E9 (corresponds to é in Latin-1)

Question

How to set VerbatimOut up correctly?

filecontents* (from “filecontents”) shows that it can work. Unfortunately, I don’t understand either code so I cannot fix fancyvrb’s code by replicating the logic from filecontents manually.

I also cannot use filecontents* instead of VerbatimOut because the former doesn’t work within a \newenvironment, while the latter does.

(Oh, by the way: vanilla Verbatim instead of VerbatimOut also works as expected. The error seems to occur when writing the file, not when reading the verbatim input)