I have a file with this unicode character ỗ
File saved in notepad as UTF-8
I tried this line
C:\blah>perl -wln -e "/\x{1ed7}/ and print;" blah.txt
But it's not picking it up. If the file has a letter like 'a'(unicode hex 61), then \x{61} picks it up. But for a 4 digit unicode character, I have an issue picking up the character.
You had the right idea with using /\x{1ed7}/. The problem is that your regex wants to match characters but you're giving it bytes. You'll need to tell Perl to decode the bytes from UTF-8 when it reads them and then encode them to UTF-8 when it writes them:
perl -CiO -ne "/\x{1ed7}/ and print" blah.txt
The -C option controls how Unicode semantics are applied to input and output filehandles. So for example -CO (capital 'o' for 'output') is equivalent to adding this before the start of your script:
binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8")
Similarly, -CI is equivalent to:
binmode(STDIN, ":utf8")
But in your case, you're not using STDIN. Instead, the -n is wrapping a loop around your code that opens each file listed on the command-line. So you can instead use -Ci to add the ':utf8' I/O layer to each file Perl opens for input. You can combine the -Ci and the -CO as: -CiO
Your script works fine. The problem is the unicode you're using for searching. Since your file is utf-8 then your unique search parameters need to be E1, BB, or 97. Check the below file encoding and how that changes the search criteria.
UTF-8 Encoding: 0xE1 0xBB 0x97
UTF-16 Encoding: 0x1ED7
UTF-32 Encoding: 0x00001ED7