My problem is whenever I use XML in Perl everything gets converted to UTF-8, which is OK, as that is documented everywhere.

The docs also advise that you use utf to minimize any problems with UTF-8 and Perl.

The authors must have been english-speaking!

My language (danish) uses three not-uncommon (in danish that is) letters: æ, ø and å, that in the characterset we normally use (ISO-8859-1) are 8 bits long. In UTF-8 they are 16-bit characters. Any attempt to use them, in eg. a comment, results in syntax errors from perl. Whats more any data that we read from a file, or want to output to a file should be in ISO-8859-1 or it will be gibberish.

The way out has been to avoid use utf; and instead convert from UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 everywhere data is fetched from XML, preferably by subclassing the XML-modules.

This is clunky, and errorprone.

Presently I sit and wait for Perl6 with line disciplines, and a new version of the operation system, that allows us to switch to UTF-8 (just leaving us with the minor task of converting all our data and files ;-)

Is there a monk out there who has another (preferably better - but I'm not picky) way of doing it?

In reply to XML converts to UTF-8 and causes problems for non-English language speakers by htoug

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