How to properly print accented characters in a file?

I'm doing a program that needs to get the words into a file that has a certain formatting. Everything is working correctly except that in the output file the accented characters are wrong. I even inserted two lines of debug to start the word found in the console, in which case the accented characters appear correctly. I believe there is some coding problem but I do not know what it is.

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

abdala

abdel-leader

abdelcdir

Findings

Adidas

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
}
}