diff --git a/tests/data/separator_unicode/cmd_and_expected_output b/tests/data/separator_unicode/cmd_and_expected_output
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f23100
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/data/separator_unicode/cmd_and_expected_output
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+$ cat $TEST_DIR/separator_unicode.tsv | $TSV2TABLE --separator=Ф
+1 | 2
+a | b | c
diff --git a/tests/data/separator_unicode/separator_unicode.tsv b/tests/data/separator_unicode/separator_unicode.tsv
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..670772f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/tests/data/separator_unicode/separator_unicode.tsv
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+1Ф2
+aФbФc
diff --git a/tsv2table b/tsv2table
index f3a3d2c..ac8858c 100755
--- a/tsv2table
+++ b/tsv2table
@@ -6,7 +6,9 @@ use feature qw(say);
 use utf8;
 use open qw(:std :utf8);
 
+use Encode qw(decode);
 use Getopt::Long;
+use I18N::Langinfo qw(CODESET langinfo);
 
 sub parse_options {
 
@@ -14,6 +16,9 @@ sub parse_options {
     my $separator;
     my $help;
 
+    my $codeset = langinfo(CODESET);
+    @ARGV = map { decode $codeset, $_ } @ARGV;
+
     GetOptions (
         'header=s' => \$header,
         'separator=s' => \$separator,
@@ -81,6 +86,7 @@ https://github.com/bessarabov/tsv2table
         separator => $separator,
     };
 
+    return $options;
 }
 
 # my ($type, $non_fractional_length, $fractional_length)  = get_type('13.123'); # ('float', 2, 4)