Regexp doesn't work for specific special characters in Perl

Question

I can't get rid of the special character ¤ and ❤ in a string:

$word = 'cɞi¤r$c❤u¨s';
$word =~ s/[^a-zöäåA-ZÖÄÅ]//g;
printf "$word\n";

On the second line I try to remove any non alphabetic characters from the string $word. I would expect to get the word circus printed out but instead I get:

ci�rc�us

The öäå and ÖÄÅ in the expression are just normal characters in the Swedish alphabet that I need included.

Answer 1

If the characters are in your source code, be sure to use utf8. If they are being read from a file, binmode $FILEHANDLE, ':utf8'.

Be sure to read perldoc perlunicode.