Re: How to deal with malformed utf8 from XML parsing

[Juerd]

I don't see the problem here. You have \xC2\x96 (2 bytes) in your XML data, which is the correct UTF-8 encoding for U+0096, and indeed your code's output properly shows that:

0x73
0x75
0x72
0x65
0x20
0x96 <-- there it is
0x20
0x42
0x6C
0x61
0x63
0x6B

print "$str\n\n"; is a mistake, though. You shouldn't print unicode text data without specifying an output :encoding on the filehandle, or encode()ing it manually.

By the way, instead of the confusing, error-prone, and tedious process of figuring out the internal state of a variable using is_utf8 and a normal print, please use Devel::Peek instead. Its Dump function, called with your $str, would output:

SV = PV(0x8641d2c) at 0x82ea98c
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x8631050 "sure \302\226 Black"\0 [UTF8 "sure \x{96} Black"]
  CUR = 13
  LEN = 16

As you can see, the "UTF8 flag" is on. The logical unicode string is within [UTF8 ... ], after the representation of the internal byte buffer.

Now, of course, the usefulness of the character U+0096, "START OF GUARDED AREA" is a rather different story. It probably is the result of mis-interpreting Windows-1251 data as ISO-8859-1 data. Windows-1251's 0x96 character is U+2013, "EN DASH", not U+0096.