Question

I am running Active Perl 5.14 on Windows 7.
I am trying to write a program that will read-in a conversion table, then work on a file and replace certain patterns by other patterns – all of the above in Unicode (UTF-8). Here is the beginning of the program:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# Load a conversion table from CONVTABLE to %ConvTable.
# Then find matches in a file and convert them.
use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;
use 5.014;
use utf8;
use autodie; 
use warnings    qw< FATAL  utf8     >;
use open        qw< :std  :utf8     >;
use charnames   qw< :full >;
use feature     qw< unicode_strings >;

my ($i,$j,$InputFile, $OutputFile,$word,$from,$to,$linetoprint);
my (@line, @lineout); 
my %ConvTable;    # Conversion hash
print 'Conversion table: opening file: E:\My Documents\Perl\Conversion table.txt'."\n";
my $sta= open (CONVTABLE, "<:encoding(utf8)", 'E:\My Documents\Perl\Conversion table.txt');
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';    # output should be in UTF-8
# Load conversion hash
while (<CONVTABLE>) {
    chomp;
    print "$_\n"; # etc ...
# etc ...

It turns out that at this point, it says:

wide character in print at (eval 155)E:/Active Perl/lib/Perl5DB.pl:640]line 2, <CONVTABLE> line 1, etc...

Why is that? I think I’ve gone through and implemented all the necessary prescriptions for correct handling of Unicode strings, decoding and encoding into UTF-8?
And how to fix it?

TIA

Helen

Answer 1

The Perl debugger has its own output handle that is distinct from STDOUT (although it may ultimately go to the same place as STDOUT). You’ll also want to do something like this near the beginning of your script:

binmode $DB::OUT, ':utf8' if $DB::OUT;