UTF8

Raku has a built in method .getc to get a single character from an open file handle. File handles default to UTF-8, so they will handle multi-byte characters correctly.

To read a single character at a time from the Standard Input terminal; $*IN in Raku:

.say while defined $_ = $*IN.getc;

Or, from a file:

my $filename = 'whatever';

my $in = open( $filename, :r ) orelse .die;

print $_ while defined $_ = $in.getc;