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

Fellow monks,
I wrote a simple script that runs on ini files with localisable content, to check for errors, etc.
All it does for example is replaces:
the letter a with ä the letter o with ô
The script works fine for Latin characters, dutifully making its replacements where an a or an o was found.No problems there, so being brave I thought to myself, what the hell, I'll give it a go with Japanese and see what happens....not much
What did happen was that I kept on getting the error message 
Use of uninitialized value in substitution iterator at line 52
Use of uninitialized value in substitution iterator at line 52

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I'm fairly new to perl, and was wondering why this was occurring, as well as a possible workaround. And also is there any information out there on Japanese language support for perl newbie? I see in CPAN that there's a module called Unicode::Japanese, could this be used?
Thanks in advance,
Martymart

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Re: Error message in script with Japanese characters
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Jan 17, 2003 at 17:14 UTC
    I don't know what your line 52 may be, but here is a problem you may have:

    In the Japanese .ini file, the codes for those letters may be different. What "code page" (encoding system) is the file using? It may be using two-byte sequences for some characters, one byte for others, and different from the accented letters in the Latin-1 code page.

    The best thing to do is transcode the INI file from whatever it's written in to Perl's native UTF-8 encoded Unicode. Then with use utf8; in effect, your tr or s/// will work just fine. Then, transcode the result to the desired character set.

    That stuff is built into Perl 5.8 ! If you aren't using it yet, this might be a compelling reason.

    —John

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