Jim has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
In the documentation of Text::CSV_XS, there's a peculiar reference to what seems like a very special case:
The separation-, escape- [sic], and escape- characters can be any ASCII character in the range from 0x20 (space) to 0x7E (tilde). Characters outside this range may or may not work as expected. … If you use perl-5.8.2 or higher, these three attributes are utf8-decoded, to increase the likelihood of success. This way U+00FE will be allowed as a quote character. [My emphasis.]
Why is this particular Unicode character, LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN, singled out for special mention in the documentation? And why does it state that "[c]haracters outside [the range from 0x20 through 0x7E] may or may not work as expected"? When might they work?
The implication of this explicit mentioning of U+00FE in the documentation is that Text::CSV_XS can be used to parse CSV records in Unicode Concordance DAT files. If this is the case, then I want to learn how to do this. (See my earlier post titled Best Way To Parse Concordance DAT File Using Modern Perl?)
Jim