Hi brethren and sestren.

On several machines at work, we run Perl 5.8.3 (yes, I know it's 10 years old; not my choice). We noticed a strange behaviour recently: we used 

tr/ / /s;

[download]

to process some HTML files. If the files contained non-latin characters (e.g. Chinese), on some machines the output was garbled. We tried to replace tr with substitution 

s/ +/ /g;

[download]

and suddenly, the output was correct.

Both input and output are marked with :encoding(utf-8). The files must be slurped in to trigger the bug, line-by-line processing produces the correct output.

Could this be one of the manifestations of The "Unicode Bug"? I have the gut feeling that the substitution might solve the problem for the given file, but the bug could reappear with the next different file. I also don't understand why the bug only appeared on some machines - the version of Perl is the same on all of them (but their Linux version is different). Is any external library involved in transliteration, substitution, or unicode handling?

BTW: I wasn't able to install 5.8.3 at home (errors during make) to test further. Update: I was able to install it with the help of Devel::PatchPerl. I wasn't able to replicate the problem, though.

لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

In reply to The Unicode Bug with Transliteration or Substitution by choroba

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.