Wide character in print at UL_VERTICA.pm line 951.

As i wrote in Re^5: Unrecognized ICU conversion error, this looks like a Unicode/UTF8 Problem.

Basically, Perl internally uses Unicode codepoints for characters, e.g. the "number" of a character can be greater than 255. Example:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use utf8;
use Encode;

# Let's use the "Medium shade" block, Unicode point 0x2592
# https://www.unicode.org/charts/beta/nameslist/n_2580.html
my $unicodechar = "\N{MEDIUM SHADE}";

print "Character code: ", ord($unicodechar), "\n";

print "Character: ", $unicodechar, "\n"; # "Wide character in print at
+ unicode_perlmonks.pl line 15."

my $utf8 = encode('UTF-8', $unicodechar, Encode::FB_CROAK);

print "Character as UTF8: ", $utf8, "\n";
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In line 15, when you try to print the internal representation, problems happen. Basically, STDOUT expects valid 8-bit-per-byte characters, but you try to output too many bits for a single byte.

With proper encoding, in this case UTF8, you can turn the single character into a bytestream that encodes the character into multiple valid bytes. This isn't just splitting up the internal bytes, it is a "proper" encoding that works around multiple issues. Like, for example, preventing bytes that have the value of zero (so as not to mess up zero terminated string handling in C-like languages).

Tom Scott has a nice video on this if you are interested how this actually works: Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle - Computerphile