Force UTF-8 Byte Order Mark in Perl file output - perl

I'm writing out a CSV file using Perl. The data going into the CSV contains Unicode characters. I'm using the following to write the CSV out:
#OPEN THE FILE FOR WRITE
open(my $fh, ">:utf8", "rpt-".$datestring.".csv")
or die "cannot open < rpt.csv: $!";
That is writing the characters correctly inside the file but doesn't appear to be including the UTF8 Byte Order Mark. This in turn throws off my users trying to open the file in Excel. Is there a way to force the Byte Order Mark to be written?
I attempted it the following way:
print $fh "\x{EFBBBF};
I ended up with gibberish at the top of the file. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Try doing this:
print $fh chr(65279);
after opening the file.

Related

Remove mysterious line breaks in CSV file using Perl

I have a CSV file that I'm parsing using Perl. The file is a BOM produced by Solidworks 2015 that was saved as an XLS file, then opened in Excel and saved as a CSV file.
There are cells that have line breaks. When I read a line with such a cell from the file, the line comes in with the line breaks. For example, here is one of the lines read looks like this:
74,,74,1,1,"SJ-TL303202-DET-074-
001",PDSI,"2.25"" DIA. X 8.00""",A2,513,1,
It reads in as a single line in Perl.
When I turn the Show All Characters in Notepad++, I can see the line breaks are cause by [CR][LF].
So I thought this would work to remove the line feeds:
$line =~ s/[\r\n]+//g;
but it does not.
You don't give much of a sample of your CSV data, but what you show is perfectly valid. A text field may contain newlines if you wish, as long as it is enclosed in double-quotes
The Text::CSV module will process it quite happily as long as you enable the binary option in the constructor call, and you may reformat the data as you wish before you write it back out again
This program expects the path to the input file as a parameter on the command line, and it will write the modified data to STDOUT, which you can redirect on the command line, like this
$ perl fix_csv.pl input.csv > output.csv
I've assumed that your data contains only 7-bit ASCII data, and it should work whether you're running it on a Windows system or on Linux
use strict;
use warnings 'all';
my ($csv_file) = #ARGV;
use Text::CSV;
open my $fh, '<', $csv_file or die qq{Unable to open "$csv_file" for input: $!};
my $csv = Text::CSV->new( { binary => 1 } );
while ( my $row = $csv->getline( $fh ) ) {
tr/\r\n//d for #$row;
$csv->combine(#$row);
print $csv->string, "\n";
}
output
74,,74,1,1,SJ-TL303202-DET-074-001,PDSI,"2.25"" DIA. X 8.00""",A2,513,1,

perl output - failing in printing utf8 text files correctly

so i have utf8 text files, which i want to read in, put the lines into an array, and print it out. But the output however doesn't print the signs correctly, for example the output line looks like following:
"arnſtein gehört gräflichen "
So i tried testing the script by one line, pasted directly into the perl script, without reading it from file. And there the output is perfectly fine. I checked the files, which are in utf8 unicode. Still the files must cause the output problem (?).
Because the script is too long, i just cut it down to the relevant:
( goes to directory, opens files, leads the input to the function &align, anaylse it, add it to an array, print the array)
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use utf8;
binmode(STDIN,":utf8");
binmode(STDOUT,":utf8");
binmode(STDERR,":utf8");
#opens directory
#opens file from directory
if (-d "$dir/$first"){
opendir (UDIR, "$dir/$first") or die "could not open: $!";
foreach my $t (readdir(UDIR)){
next if $first eq ".";
next if $first eq "..";
open(GT,"$dir/$first/$t") or die "Could not open GT, $!";
my $gt= <GT>;
chomp $gt;
#directly pasted lines in perl - creates correct output
&align("det man die Profeſſores der Philoſophie re- ");
#lines from file - output not correct
#&align($gt);
close GT;
next;
}closedir UDIR;
}
Any idea ?
You told Perl that your source code was UTF-8, and that STDIN, STDOUT, & STDERR are UTF-8, but you didn't say that the file you're reading contains UTF-8.
open(GT,"<:utf8", "$dir/$first/$t") or die "Could not open GT, $!";
Without that, Perl assumes the file is encoded in ISO-8859-1, since that's Perl's default charset if you don't specify a different one. It helpfully transcodes those ISO-8859-1 characters to UTF-8 for output, since you've told it that STDOUT uses UTF-8. Since the file was actually UTF-8, not ISO-8859-1, you get incorrect output.

i am not getting kannada text when i run the perl script on a file

i am having following code for extracting the text from the html files and writing to a text file. in html it contain kannada text(utf-8) when programs runs i am getting a text file in that i am getting text but its not in proper formate. text is in unreadable formate
enter code here
use utf8;
use HTML::FormatText;
my $string = HTML::FormatText->format_file(
'a.html',
leftmargin => 0, rightmargin => 50
);
open mm,">t1.txt";
print mm "$string";
so please do help me.how to handle the file formates while we are processing it.
If I understand you correctly, you want the output file to be UTF-8 encoded so that the characters from the Kannada language are encoded in the output correctly. Your code is probably trying (and failing) to encode incorrectly into ISO-8859-1 instead.
If so, then what you can do is make sure your file is opened with a UTF-8 encoding filter.
use HTML::FormatText;
open my $htmlfh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', 'a.html' or die "cannot open a.html: $!";
my $content = do { local $/; <$htmlfh> }; # read all content from file
close $htmlfh;
my $string = HTML::FormatText->format_string(
$content,
leftmargin => 0, rightmargin => 50
);
open my $mm, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', 't1.txt' or die "cannot open t1.txt: $!";
print $mm $string;
For further reading, I recommend checking out these docs:
perlunitut
perlunifaq
perlunicode
A few other notes:
The use utf8 line only makes it so that your Perl script/library may contain UTF formatting. It does not make any changes to how you read or write files.
Avoid using two-argument forms of open() like in your example. It may allow a malicious user to compromise your system in certain cases. (Though, your usage in this example happens to safe.
When opening a file, you need to add an or die afterwards or failures to read or write the file will be silently ignored.
Update 3/12: I changed it to read the file in UTF-8 and send that to HTML::FormatText. If your a.html file is saved with a BOM character at the start, it may have done the right thing anyway, but this should make it always assume UTF-8 for the incoming file.

Line breaks don't exist on input from FTP file (Perl)

I downloaded a csv file using Net::FTP. When I look at this file in text editor or excel or even when I cut/paste it has line breaks and looks like this:
000000000G911|06
0000000000CDR|25|123
0000000000EGP|19
When I read the file in Perl it sees the entire text as one line like this:
000000000G911|060000000000CDR|25|1230000000000EGP|19
I have tried reading it using
tie #lines, 'Tie::File', "C:/Programs/myfile.csv", autochomp=>0 or die "Can't read file: $!\n";
foreach $l (#lines1)
{print "$l\n";
}
and
open FILE, "`<`$filename" or die $!;
my #lines=`<`FILE>;
foreach $l (#lines)
{print "$l\n";
}
close FILE;
The file has line breaks in a format that Perl is not recognizing because it is coming from a different operating system. The other programs are automatically detecting the different line break format, but Perl doesn't do that.
If you have Net::FTP perform the transfer in ASCII mode (e.g. $ftp->ascii to enable this mode), this should be taken care of and corrected for you.
Alternatively, you can figure out what is being used for line breaks and then set the special $/ variable to that value.

Unable to read RTF file using Perl on Mac

I'm trying Perl on Mac.
I have to read an RTF text file. the content of the file is "36" (without double quotes). thats it, just two characters.
Here is the code I have to read it.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $file = "verInfo.rtf";
unless(open FILE, $file) {
# Die with error message
# if we can't open it.
die "\nUnable to open $file\n";
}
my $oldversion = <FILE>;
print "conent is $oldversion";
close FILE;
Remember all I want is to read the value 36 from file and store it as a integer in $oldversion
But when I read the file and print it, it prints following
conent is {\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf360
Im not able to read 36.
You're not reading a text file, you're reading an RTF file. You made the file with TextEdit, right? TextEdit saves things as text/rtf rather than text/plain by default, if you want to save the file as plain text you should use "Format | Make Plain Text" (AKA Shift-Cmd-T) before you save it; then you'll get a simple text file with just your "36" in it.
The text is there:
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\cocoartf1038\cocoasubrtf360
^^
You have an RTF file. Use an RTF parser