[TxMt] tm_dialog: *.plist | pl -> utf8 problem

Hi,

sorry if my question is a bit off topic but I couldn't find any information.

I'm just writing a tiny perl script which converts non-ASCII characters coming from 'defaults read ...' to utf-8 because I want to simplify the interaction between BASH and tm_dialog. This works perfectly even with utf-16 surrogates.

But then I was a bit naïve! I thought that 'pl' outputs non-ASCII characters in the same way, but it didn't.

E.g. an German umlaut 'ö' stored in a xml plist format is outputted as '\U221a\U2202'!!

Has someone an idea what kind of 'format' it is? I found no documentation.

Or could it mean that 'pl' do not support utf-8 string at all?

Thanks for any hint

Hans