humble has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Good time of the day, people.

I'm localizing perl script (from english to russian) and have problems w/ encoding when script prints to terminal (encoding utf-8).

I made a module (encoding utf-8) where is my collection of variables, now i translate it. Then i transfer those variables to the script through qw().

Problem is that after direct printing to terminal those variables give me unreadable characters, like ив.

I have tried to put

use Encode;
binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";

[download]

but it did not help me.

So, i have to decode every variable before use unless i do want to see the garbage:

$out=decode( "UTF-8", $out);

My questions are:

1. Is there an easier way to output variables w/o need of decoding every variable?

2. Why i having variables' contetnt written in utf8 and terminal in utf8 - can not simply print it so it might be readable in russian?

3. May you have other (simpler) suggestions regarding localization of scripts?

Thanks for any advance.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Problems w/ encoding in terminal
by rjt (Curate) on Aug 06, 2013 at 12:04 UTC

    Provided you save your localization module with utf8 encoding, just include use utf8; in that module. See perlunicode, and Tom Christiansen's most excellent Stackoverflow answer on unicode. Here's an example you can work from:

        use Encode;
    binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
    require 'russian.pl';

    my $en = 'Hello';
    printf "English: %s, Russian: %s\n",
        $en, MyPackage::ru::translate($en);

    [download]

    Output:

    English: Hello, Russian: привет

    If you run this exact code with russian.pl encoded in utf8, and do not see the expected Cyrillic script, check your terminal settings and/or try another. Also beware if you are piping the output through other programs that are not aware of the encoding.

    russian.pl:

        package MyPackage::ru;

    use utf8; # Tells Perl to interpret this source file as utf8
    use Carp;

    # Very crude translation table
    my %trans = (
        # XXX - Note actual code contains the literal utf8 characters,
        #       not any kind of escapes. PerlMonks insists on converti
+ng
        #       them to HTML character entities.
        hello   => 'привет',
    );

    sub translate { $trans{ lc $_[0] } || croak 'No translation for '.
+$_[0] }

    [download]

    As a (sort-of) aside to your question, however, you might want to check out Locale::Maketext to save yourself the work of re-inventing a localization module.

    use strict; use warnings; omitted for brevity.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Thank you ver much! Very insteresting idea! I will consider how i can use the modules in my future work.
[reply]
Re: Problems w/ encoding in terminal
by choroba (Cardinal) on Aug 06, 2013 at 11:43 UTC
    What encoding do you use to save the script? If you save it as utf-8 and tell Perl you did so by
    use utf8;

    [download]
    everything should just work (i.e. no Encode, output set to utf-8, terminal set to utf-8).
    لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ
[reply]
[d/l]
      What would you advice me to correctly output a file content from the same my script? - Again, the file content is in UTF8, but in UTF8 terminal it is not readable since outputed from my script. Do i have to decode the file content every time i want to output it using 'Encode' module?
[reply]
        Just tell Perl what encoding the file uses. There are several ways:

        When opening the file 

        open my $OUT, '>:utf8', $filename or die $!;

        [download]

        Or, after opening the file: 

        open my $OUT, '>', $filename or die $!;
binmode $OUT, ':utf8';

        [download]

        Or, if you want all your output be in UTF-8: 

        use open OUT => ':utf8';

        [download]

        See open, open, binmode for details. You can also use ':encoding(UTF-8)' instead of ':utf8' to let Perl check the validity of the data.

        لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Thank you very much: worked and so i will be watching for the directive to use in the future!
[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom