Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / March 2005

Hello, all!

What I have is not a problem with perl on Mac OS X, but rather a
problem on Mac OS X that I'd like to solve using perl. I'm not sure how
to go about solving it, and am looking for suggestions.

I have a number of files that were created on Windows that have
Japanese characters in the file name. The files were sent to me zipped.
When the zip archive is uncompressed with English as the main language
under Mac OS X, the filenames are malformed. (iirc, if Japanese is the
main language, this isn't a problem, but it's been awhile since I've
done that, and I wouldn't want to have to switch languages and relaunch
the Finder every time I unzipped a file that might have Japanese in the
filename.)

I'd like to make a perl script that would rename the files, but I'm not
sure how to force reading the characters as a different encoding, nor
sure which encoding I should use. I can handle a little trial and error
with the last part (trying different encodings should be a simple
matter of a foreach loop :), but am not sure how to approach the
re-encoding part.

Hints, pointers, perldoc references much appreciated.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com