How to correctly print accented characters in file?

Question

I am making a program that needs to get the words in a file that has a certain formatting. Everything is working correctly except that, in the output file, accented characters get wrong. I even inserted two debug lines to print the word found in the console and, in this case, the accented characters appear correctly. I believe there’s some coding problem but I don’t know what it is.

The output in the file looks like this: (the weird things are the accented letters)

Abdala

abdel¡

abduct

achªmenes

Adã³Nide

Code:

while (<$in>){
if ($_ =~ /& .*/){ # Testa se a linha tem o formato de interesse.
    my @linha = split (//, $_);
    my $count = 0;

    # Obtém o início da palavra.
    while ($linha[$count] !~ /[a-zA-Záéíóúãẽĩõũâêîôûàèìòùäëïöü]/) { $count++; } 
    my $inicio = $count;

    # Obtém o fim da palavra e calcula o tamanho.
    while ($linha[$count] =~ /[a-zA-ZáéíóúãẽĩõũâêîôûàèìòùäëïöüÁÉÍÓÚÃẼĨÕŨÂÊÎÔÛÀÈÌÒÙÄËÏÖÜ]/) { $count++; }
    my $tamanho = $count - $inicio;         

    # Obtém a palavra em caixa baixa e grava no arquivo.
    my $palavra = lc (substr ($_, $inicio, $tamanho));
    print $out "$palavra\n";

    print $palavra; #DEBUG
    print "\n"; #DEBUG
}
}