I tried a minimal example with perl 5.8.3, and tr/// didn't break non-ASCII (and non-Latin-1) characters in decoded strings. It also doesn't transliterate away UTF-8 bytes from a decoded string.

So my minimal tests weren't able to reproduce your problem. Of course, your mileage varies, so more details might be of interest.

It could be :) so you have sample data to play with?

Have you tried utf8::upgrade($string)? Maybe you can try Unicode::Semantics

You can use the Japanese Wikipedia Perl page . Perl 5.8.3 at work outputs different files for

tr/ / /s; tr/\t/ /s;
[download]

and

s/ +/ /g; s/\t+/ /g;
[download]

I tested with diff -w against the original, i.e. ignoring whitespace.

utf8::upgrade didn't change anything, before or after the substitution/transliteration.

لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

I wonder if your various systems with 5.8.3 might have different versions of Encode.

Thank you. Some of the machines indeed had a different version of the Encode module. There are still some, though, that have the same version, but produce different results. The only difference I can see is one of them is 32 bit, while the second one is 64 bit (but Perl is 32 bit).

Update: I ran the process via strace on both machines. One of the many differences I noticed was the size of the read buffer: on the 32 bit machine, read(3 is called with the buffer size of 32768, while on the 64 machine, the size is 65536. There might be a problem if a multibyte character is split between two subsequent buffers. It would also explain why the output is not different when the input is processed line by line (no line is longer than 32768 bytes). It still doesn't explain why substitution fixes the problem, though.

لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

I would have expected that if a file larger than the low-level input buffer size has been slurped, then the contents of multiple, consecutive read (3) calls have simply been concatenated without further ado into a single string buffer, prior to whatever processing comes next in the script. Given that the perl version and Encode version are the same, differences in cpu "native word" size and read buffer size should have no impact. (Rather, if the word/buffer size had any impact, it should affect other behaviors on slurped files, not just tr/ / /s vs. s/ +/ /g.)

So, when you compared your two machines that were both 32-bit 5.8.3 with the same version of Encode, but 32-bit vs. 64-bit cpus (smaller and larger read buffers), which one had the strange behavior with tr/ / /s going crazy?

Did the differences in Encode versions on other machines show any relation to the strange behavior? (Were you able to look at the release notes of the later Encode version(s) to see if anything relevant was fixed?)

If you have some version of Perl running on your home machine, you can try installing Devel::PatchPerl. Then, after you expand your Perl 5.8.3 distribution but before you run Configure, cd to the expanded distribution and run patchperl. This might get you through the build, though it does not guarantee a clean test.

Thank you. I was able to install 5.8.3 after patching the sources. I even got clean tests.

I wasn't able to reproduce the problem in the Perl 5.8.3 I installed, though. The output was the same for both transliteration and substitution. So, it seems, our historical Perl installation is buggy.

لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ