Encoding Problem - UTF-8 (I think)

[Melly]

Hi Monks

I'm trying to handle some values from a text file in Perl, but it's having a problem with what I think is a UTF-8 middle decimal point (U+00B7 - ·).

Unpacking it gives me 194183.

[choroba]

Without seeing the script, it's hard to tell, but I'd guess you failed to specify the encoding layer when opening the file:

open my $FH, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', 'filename.txt' or die $!;
#              ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Unpacking how? There are various templates you can use.

Update:

Yes, that's it:

#! /usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature qw{ say };
use Encode;


my $s = encode('UTF-8', "\N{MIDDLE DOT}");
say join ' ', unpack "C*", $s;

[Melly]

I unpacked with "unpack ('C*', $_);"

Hmm... in Notepad++ when the encoding is set to utf-8, it looks okay (a weird floating decimal point), but if I switch to ansi, then I see circumflex A + weird decimal point, which is what perl is outputting when it comes across this value.

Sigh - I hate encoding issues - the IRQs of today.

[BrowserUk]

I hate encoding issues - the IRQs of today.

It's worse. IRQs are/were a necessary evil; Unicrap on the other hand is stupid by design.

[Melly]

Hmm... well, I struggled to get perl to interpret the rogue characters in a meaningful way, but this regex fixed them:

$value =~ s/\302\267/\./;