I'm trying to make a script to find the login of a user given his full name . It works for names without accents , but for accents it fails (as all user names in the network have no accents).
So I tried this function to remove accents:

sub Transform {
local($str)= $_[0];
$str=~ s/\á/a/g;
$str=~ s/\é/e/g;
$str=~ s/\í/i/g;
$str=~ s/\ó/o/g;
$str=~ s/\ú/u/g;
$str=~ s/\â/a/g;
$str=~ s/\ê/e/g;
$str=~ s/\ô/o/g;
$str=~ s/\ã/a/g;
$str=~ s/\õ/o/g;
$str=~ s/\ç/c/g;
$str=~ s/\Á/A/g;
$str=~ s/\É/E/g;
$str=~ s/\Í/I/g;
$str=~ s/\Ó/O/g;
$str=~ s/\Ú/U/g;
return $str;
}

but it doesnt work. I tried to use s/"\x82"/a/ for example (dont know if 82 is the hex value of any accented "a" character ...) and it didnt work also... I preffer to use octal or hex values , because typing the accented char is problematic (the locale on each system can affect this..)..

Any ideas on how to make this work?

Your function works for me with the plain accented characters, no need to back-slashing them though (but it doesn't hurt either).
Perhaps is it the way the characters are coded in your script that differs from the way the characters are sent to the function.

Did you tried to test your function from inside ?
e.g.
print Transform("hello world éè\n");

it's weird.. I tried testing this way:

$test = "áéè test";
$test1 = &Transform($test);

and it worked...

I'm reading my input from a file . Is anything else that could be wrong?

what editor are you using ?
what command are you using to run the filter ?
try to pass your program through itself to see if it removes its accents.

I'm using emacs. if I do:
./findlogin.pl findlogin.pl
it replaces the accents on the source of the program...
I guess I'm gonna do some tests on the input file...

edit:
weird.. I've created the input file again and now it works..

Did you kept the old file ?
If true, you can do an "od -c" on both and see if the character coding differs.

I thought I would die without finding out what happened , so I simply deleted the file and created it again... well, at least now I know a new command..