My delicious-to-wp perl script works but gives for all "weird" characters even weirder output.
So I tried
$description = decode_utf8( $description );
but that doesnt make a difference. I would like e.g. “go live” to become “go live” and not “go live†How can I handle unicode in Perl so that this works?
UPDATE: I found the problem was to set utf of DBI I had to set in Perl:
my $sql = qq{SET NAMES 'utf8';};
$dbh->do($sql);
That was the part that I had to set, tricky. Thanks!
It's worth noting that if you're running a version of DBD::mysql new enough (3.0008 on), you can do the following: $dbh->{'mysql_enable_utf8'} = 1; and then everything's decode()ed/encode()ed for you on the way out from/in to DBI.
Enable UTF8, when you connect to database like this:
my $dbh = DBI->connect(
"dbi:mysql:dbname=db_name",
"db_user", "db_pass",
{RaiseError => 0, PrintError => 0, mysql_enable_utf8 => 1}
) or die "Connect to database failed.";
This should get you character mode strings with the UTF8 flag set as needed.
From DBI General Interface Rules & Caveats:
Perl supports two kinds of strings: Unicode (utf8 internally) and non-Unicode (defaults to iso-8859-1 if forced to assume an encoding). Drivers should accept both kinds of strings and, if required, convert them to the character set of the database being used. Similarly, when fetching from the database character data that isn't iso-8859-1 the driver should convert it into utf8.
And the specifics from DBD::mysql for mysql_enable_utf8
Additionally, turning on this flag tells MySQL that incoming data should be treated as UTF-8. This will only take effect if used as part of the call to connect(). If you turn the flag on after connecting, you will need to issue the command SET NAMES utf8 to get the same effect.
The term
$dbh->do(qq{SET NAMES 'utf8';});
definitely saves the day for accessing an utf-8 declared database, but take notice, if you are going to do any perl processing of any data obatined from the db it would be wise to store it in a perl var as an utf8 string with, as this operation is not implicit.
$utfstring = decode('utf8',$string_from_db);
of course, for proper i/o handling of utf8 strings (reading, printing, writing to output) remember to set
use open ':utf8';
and
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
the latter being essential for printing out utf8 strings. Hope this helps.
It may have nothing to do with Perl. Check to make sure you're using UTF encodings in the pertinent MySQL table columns.
Leave this öne out:
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
when using:
$dbh->do(qq{SET NAMES 'utf8';});
Otherwise your output will have double utf8 encoding, resulting in unreadable double byte characters!
It took me a couple of hours to figure this out..
By default, the driver Perl/MySQL handles binary data (at least I concluded this from some experiments with MySQL 5.1 and 5.5).
Without setting mysql_enable_utf8, I encoded/decoded the strings to/from UTF-8 before writing/reading to/from the database.
It should not be relied upon the perl-internal string representation as an array of byte; be aware that the internal 'utf8' is not guaranteed to be standard UTF-8; in converse, the single byte encoding is not guaranteed to be ISO-8859-1; really do encode/decode to/from UTF-8 (and not 'utf8').
There are also some settings of MySQL (like SET NAMES above, as far as I remember there is a client encoding, a connection encoding, and a server encoding, whose interactions are not quite clear to me if they do not all have the same value) regarding to the encodings; setting all of them to UTF-8, and the recipe above, worked for me.
Related
I have a reasonable size flat file database of text documents mostly saved in 8859 format which have been collected through a web form (using Perl scripts). Up until recently I was negotiating the common 1252 characters (curly quotes, apostrophes etc.) with a simple set of regex's:
$line=~s/\x91/\&\#8216\;/g; # smart apostrophe left
$line=~s/\x92/\&\#8217\;/g; # smart apostrophe right
... etc.
However since I decided I ought to be going Unicode, and have converted all my scripts to read in and output utf8 (which works a treat for all new material), the regex for these (existing) 1252 characters no longer works and my Perl html output outputs literally the 4 characters: '\x92' and '\x93' etc. (at least that's how it appears on a browser in utf8 mode, downloading (ftp not http) and opening in a text editor (textpad) it's different, a single undefined character remains, and opening the output file in Firefox default (no content type header) 8859 mode renders the correct character).
The new utf8 pragmas at the start of the script are:
use CGI qw(-utf8);
use open IO => ':utf8';
I understand this is due to utf8 mode making the characters double byte instead of single byte and applies to those chars in the 0x80 to 0xff range, having read up the article on wikibooks relating to this, however I was non the wiser as to how to filter them. Ideally I know I ought to resave all the documents in utf8 mode (since the flat file database now contains a mixture of 8859 and utf8), however I will need some kind of filter in the first place if I'm going to do this anyway.
And I could be wrong as to the 2-byte storage internally, since it did seem to imply that Perl handles stuff very differently according to various circumstances.
If anybody could provide me with a regex solution I would be very grateful. Or some other method. I have been tearing my hair out for weeks on this with various attempts and failed hacking. There's simply about 6 1252 characters that commonly need replacing, and with a filter method I could resave the whole flippin lot in utf8 and forget there ever was a 1252...
Encoding::FixLatin was specifically written to help fix data broken in the same manner as yours.
Ikegami already mentioned the Encoding::FixLatin module.
Another way to do it, if you know that each string will be either UTF-8 or CP1252, but not a mixture of both, is to read it as a binary string and do:
unless ( utf8::decode($string) ) {
require Encode;
$string = Encode::decode(cp1252 => $string);
}
Compared to Encoding::FixLatin, this has two small advantages: a slightly lower chance of misinterpreting CP1252 text as UTF-8 (because the entire string must be valid UTF-8) and the possibility of replacing CP1252 with some other fallback encoding. A corresponding disadvantage is that this code could fall back to CP1252 on strings that are not entirely valid UTF-8 for some other reason, such as because they were truncated in the middle of a multi-byte character.
You could also use Encode.pm's support for fallback.
use Encode qw[decode];
my $octets = "\x91 Foo \xE2\x98\xBA \x92";
my $string = decode('UTF-8', $octets, sub {
my ($ordinal) = #_;
return decode('Windows-1252', pack 'C', $ordinal);
});
printf "<%s>\n",
join ' ', map { sprintf 'U+%.4X', ord $_ } split //, $string;
Output:
<U+2018 U+0020 U+0046 U+006F U+006F U+0020 U+263A U+0020 U+2019>
Did you recode the data files? If not, opening them as UTF-8 won't work. You can simply open them as
open $filehandle, '<:encoding(cp1252)', $filename or die ...;
and everything (tm) should work.
If you did recode, something seem to have gone wrong, and you need to analyze what it is, and fix it. I recommend using hexdump to find out what actually is in a file. Text consoles and editors sometimes lie to you, hexdump never lies.
I've tried everything Google and StackOverflow have recommended (that I could find) including using Encode. My code works but it just uses UTF8 and I get the wide character warnings. I know how to work around those warnings but I'm not using UTF8 for anything else so I'd like to just convert it and not have to adapt the rest of my code to deal with it. Here's my code:
my $xml = XMLin($content);
# Populate the #titles array with each item title.
my #titles;
for my $item (#{$xml->{channel}->{item}}) {
my $title = Encode::decode_utf8($item->{title});
#my $title = $item->{title};
#utf8::downgrade($title, 1);
Encode::from_to($title, 'utf8', 'iso-8859-1');
push #titles, $title;
}
return #titles;
Commented out you can see some of the other things I've tried. I'm well aware that I don't know what I'm doing here. I just want to end up with a plain old ASCII string though. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
The answer depends on how you want to use the title. There are 3 basic ways to go:
Bytes that represent a UTF-8 encoded string.
This is the format that should be used if you want to store the UTF-8 encoded string outside your application, be it on disk or sending it over the network or anything outside the scope of your program.
A string of Unicode characters.
The concept of characters is internal to Perl. When you perform Encode::decode_utf8, then a bunch of bytes is attempted to be converted to a string of characters, as seen by Perl. The Perl VM (and the programmer writing Perl code) cannot externalize that concept except through decoding UTF-8 bytes on input and encoding them to UTF-8 bytes on output. For example, your program receives two bytes as input that you know they represent UTF-8 encoded character(s), let's say 0xC3 0xB6. In that case decode_utf8 returns a representation that instead of two bytes, sees one character: ö.
You can then proceed to manipulate that string in Perl. To illustrate the difference further, consider the following code:
my $bytes = "\xC3\xB6";
say length($bytes); # prints "2"
my $string = decode_utf8($bytes);
say length($string); # prints "1"
The special case of ASCII, a subset of UTF-8.
ASCII is a very small subset of Unicode, where characters in that range are represented by a single byte. Converting Unicode into ASCII is an inherently lossy operation, as most of the Unicode characters are not ASCII characters. You're either forced to drop every character in your string which is not in ASCII or try to map from a Unicode character to their closest ASCII equivalents (which isn't possible in the vast majority of cases), when trying to coerce a Unicode string to ASCII.
Since you have wide character warnings, it means that you're trying to manipulate (possibly output) Unicode characters that cannot be represented as ASCII or ISO-8859-1.
If you do not need to manipulate the title from your XML document as a string, I'd suggest you leave it as UTF-8 bytes (I'd mention that you should be careful not to mix bytes and characters in strings). If you do need to manipulate it, then decode, manipulate, and on output encode it in UTF-8.
For further reading, please use perldoc to study perlunitut, perlunifaq, perlunicode, perluniintro, and Encode.
Although this is an old question, I just spent several hours (!) trying to do more or less the same thing! That is: read data from a UTF-8 XML file, and convert that data into the Windows-1252 codepage (I could also have used Latin1, ISO-8859-1 etc.) in order to be able to create filenames with accented letters.
After much experimentation, and even more searching, I finally managed to get the conversion working. The "trick" is to use Encode::encode instead of Encode::decode.
For example, given the code in the original question, the correct (or at least one :-) way to convert from UTF-8 would be:
my $title = Encode::encode("Windows-1252", $item->{title});
or
my $title = Encode::encode("ISO-8859-1", $item->{title});
or
my $title = Encode::encode("<your-favourite-codepage-here>", $item->{title});
I hope this helps others having similar problems!
You can use the following line to simply get rid of the warning. This assumes that you want to use UTF8, which shouldn't normally be a problem.
binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(utf8)");
I'm running Perl 5.10.0 and Postgres 8.4.3, and strings into a database, which is behind a DBIx::Class.
These strings should be in UTF-8, and therefore my database is running in UTF-8. Unfortunatly some of these strings are bad, containing malformed UTF-8, so when I run it I'm getting an exception
DBI Exception: DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xb5
I thought that I could simply ignore the invalid ones, and worry about the malformed UTF-8 later, so using this code, it should flag and ignore the bad titles.
if(not utf8::valid($title)){
$title="Invalid UTF-8";
}
$data->title($title);
$data->update();
However Perl seems to think that the strings are valid, but it still throws the exceptions.
How can I get Perl to detect the bad UTF-8?
First off, please follow the documentation - the utf8 module should only be used in the 'use utf8;' form to indicate that your source code is UTF-8 instead of Latin-1. Don't use any of the utf8 functions.
Perl makes the distinction between bytes and UTF-8 strings. In byte mode, Perl doesn't know or care what encoding you are using, and will use Latin-1 if you print it. Take for example the Euro sign (€). In UTF-8 this is 3 bytes, 0xE2, 0x82, 0xAC. If you print the length of these bytes, Perl will return 3. Again, it doesn't care about the encoding. It can be any bytes or any encoding, legal or illegal.
If you use the Encode module and call Encode::decode("UTF-8', $bytes) you will get a new string which has the so-called UTF8 flag set. Perl now knows your string is in UTF-8, and will return a length of 1.
The problem that utf8::valid only applies to the second type of string. Your strings are probably in the first form, byte mode, and utf8::valid just returns true for anything in byte form. This is documented in the perldoc.
The solution is to get Perl to decode your byte strings as UTF-8, and detect any errors. This can be done with FB_CROAK as brian d foy explains:
my $ustring =
eval { decode( 'UTF-8', $byte_string, FB_CROAK ) }
or die "Could not decode string: $#";
You can then catch that error and skip those invalid strings.
Or if you know your code is mostly UTF-8 with a few invalid sequences here and there, you can use:
my $ustring = decode( 'UTF-8', $byte_string );
which uses the default mode of FB_DEFAULT, replacing invalid characters with U+FFFD, the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (diamond with question mark in it).
You can then pass the string directly to your database driver in most cases. Some drivers may require you to re-encode the string back to byte form first:
my $byte_string = encode('UTF-8', $ustring);
There are also regexes online that you can use to check for valid UTF-8 sequences before calling decode (check other Stack Overflow answers). If you use those regexes, you don't need to do any encoding or decoding.
Finally, please use UTF-8 rather than utf8 in your calls to decode. The latter is more lax and allows some invalid UTF-8 sequences (such as sequences outside the Unicode range) to be allowed through.
How are you getting your strings? Are you sure that Perl thinks that they are UTF-8 already? If they aren't decoded yet (that is, octets interpreted as some encoding), you need to do that yourself:
use Encode;
my $ustring =
eval { decode( 'utf8', $byte_string, FB_CROAK ) }
or die "Could not decode string: $#";
Better yet, if you know that your source of strings is already UTF-8, you need to read that source as UTF-8. Look at the code you have that gets the strings to see if you are doing that properly.
As the documentation for utf8::valid points out, it returns true if the string is marked as UTF-8 and it's valid UTF-8, or if the string isn't UTF-8 at all. Although it's impossible to tell without seeing the code in context and knowing what the data is, most likely what you want isn't the "valid utf8" check at all; probably you just need to do
$data->title( Encode::encode("UTF-8", $title) )
Lets say i have this code:
use strict;
use LWP qw ( get );
my $content = get ( "http://www.msn.co.il" );
print STDERR $content;
The error log shows something like "\xd7\x9c\xd7\x94\xd7\x93\xd7\xa4\xd7\xa1\xd7\x94"
which i'm guessing it's utf-16 ?
The website's encoding is with
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1255">
so why these characters appear and not the windows-1255 chars ?
And, another weird thing is that i have two servers:
the first server returning CP1255 chars and i can simply convert it to utf8,
and the current server gives me these chars and i can't do anything with it ...
is there any configuration file in apache/perl/module that is messing up the encoding ?
forcing something ... ?
The result in my website at the second server, is that the perl file and the headers are all utf8, so when i write text that aren't english chars, the content from the example above is showing ok ( even though it's weird utf chars ) but my own static text are look like "×ס'××ר××:"
One more thing that i tested is ...
Through perl:
my $content = `curl "http://www.anglo-saxon.co.il"`;
I get utf8 encoding.
Through Bash:
curl "http://www.anglo-saxon.co.il"
and here i get CP1255 ( Windows-1255 ) encoding ...
Also,
when i run the script in bash - it gives CP1255, and when run it through the web - then it's utf8 again ...
fixed the problem by changin the content from utf8 - to what is supposed to, and then back to utf8:
use Text::Iconv;
my $converter = Text::Iconv->new("utf8", "CP1255");
$content=$converter->convert($content);
my $converter = Text::Iconv->new("CP1255", "utf8");
$content=$converter->convert($content);
All of this manual encoding and decoding is unnecessary. The HTML is lying to you when it says that the page is encoded in windows-1255; the server says it's serving UTF-8, and it is. Blame Microsoft HTML-generation tools.
Anyway, since the server does return the correct encoding, this works:
my $response = LWP::UserAgent->new->get("http://www.msn.co.il/");
my $content = $res->decoded_content;
$content is now a perl character string, ready to do whatever you need. If you want to convert it to some other encoding, then calling Encode::encode on it is appropriate; do not use Encode::decode as it's already been decoded once.
http://www.msn.co.il is in UTF-8, and indicates that properly. The string "\xd7\x9c\xd7\x94\xd7\x93\xd7\xa4\xd7\xa1\xd7\x94" is also proper UTF-8 (להדפסה). I don't see the problem.
I think your second problem is due to you mixing different encodings (UTF-8 and Windows-1252). You might want to encode/decode your strings properly.
First, note that you should import get from LWP::Simple. Second, everything works fine with:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;
use LWP::Simple qw ( getstore );
getstore 'http://www.msn.co.il', 'test.html';
which indicates to me that the problem is the encoding of the filehandle to which you are sending the output.
The string with the hex values that you gave appears to be a UTF-8 encoding. You are getting this because Perl ‘likes to’ use UTF-8 when it deals with strings. The LWP::Simple->get() method automatically decodes the content from the server which includes undoing any Content-Encoding as well as converting to UTF-8.
You could dig into the internals and get a version that does change the character encoding (see HTTP::Message's decoded_content, which is used by HTTP::Response's decoded_content, which you can get from LWP::UserAgent's get). But it may be easier to re-encode the data in your desired encoding with something like
use Encode;
...;
$cp1255_bytes = encode('CP1255', decode('UTF_8', $utf8_bytes));
The mixed readable/garbage characters you see are due to mixing multiple, incompatible encodings in the same stream. Probably the stream is labeled as UTF-8 but you are putting CP1255 encoded characters into it. You either need to label the stream as CP1255 and put only CP1255-encoded data into it, or label it as UTF-8 and put only UTF-8-encoded data into it. Remind yourself that bytes are not characters and convert between them appropriately.
I'm running an experiment on Berkeley DBs. I'm simply removing the contents from DB a and reinserting the key-value pairs into DB b. However, I am getting Wide character errors when inserting key-value pairs into this DB b. Help?
BerkeleyDB stores bytes ("octets"). Perl strings are made of Perl characters. In order to store Perl characters in the octet-based store, you have to convert the characters to bytes. This is called encoding, as in character-encoding.
The warning you get indicates that Perl is doing the conversion for you, and is guessing about what character encoding you want to use. Since it will probably guess wrong, it's best to explicitly say. The Encode module allows you to do that.
Instead of writing:
$db->store( key => $value );
You should instead write:
use Encode qw(encode);
$db->store( key => encode('utf-8', $value) );
And on the way out:
use Encode qw(decode);
$db->get($key, $octets); # BDB returns the result via the arg list. C programmers...
my $value = decode('utf-8', $octets);
This is true of more than just BDB; whenever you are communicating across the network, via files, via the terminal, or pretty much anything, you must be sure to encode characters to octets on the way out, and decode octets to characters on the way in. Otherwise, your program will not work.