How can I convert messages in an mbox file to UTF-8?

Question

Hello,

I am trying to modify the below program to ensure each msg is converted to utf-8 using Encode::decode(), but I am unsure of how and where to place this to make it work.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Mail::Box::Manager;

open (MYFILE, '>>data.txt');
binmode(MYFILE, ':encoding(UTF-8)');


my $file = shift || $ENV{MAIL};
my $mgr = Mail::Box::Manager->new(
    access          => 'r',
);

my $folder = $mgr->open( folder => $file )
or die "$file: Unable to open: $!\n";

for my $msg ( sort { $a->timestamp <=> $b->timestamp } $folder->messages)
{
    my $to          = join( ', ', map { $_->format } $msg->to );
    my $from        = join( ', ', map { $_->format } $msg->from );
    my $date        = localtime( $msg->timestamp );
    my $subject     = $msg->subject;
    my $body        = $msg->decoded->string;

    # Strip all quoted text
    $body =~ s/^>.*$//msg;

    print MYFILE <<"";
From: $from
To: $to
Date: $date
Subject: $subject
\n
$body

}

Answer 1

Nothing in the script seems to be specifying what encoding you expect the input to be in... normally that's important since auto-detection of character encodings in hard (and not usually supported by encoding libraries).

Answer 2

From the documentation I suspect you want to replace

my $body        = $msg->decoded->string;

with

my $body        = $msg->decoded('UTF-8')->string;

Though I'm not completely sure and it may not matter at all.