Here's the situation: I've got a big ol' CSV file full of data exported from an MS SQL database. I need to massage this data into XML documents that can be parsed with XML::Parser. So far I've been using Text::xSV and XML::Writer to get the job done. All was well until I started getting errors from XML::Parser like this: 

not well-formed (invalid token) 
at line 514, column 188, byte 72499 
at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.1/i686-linux/XML/Parser.pm line 
+185

[download]

I get a few dozen of these. All the bytes they're pointing to are high-ASCII characters of some sort. I'm guessing this means I need to do something special to output clean UTF-8. Somehow I thought XML::Writer would take care of that, but I guess not.

My first attempt was to use Unicode::Map8 to translate the input data from Latin1 (a guess at the character set) to UTF-8. That didn't work. So I tried the umap utility, which I've used successfully in similar circumstances before:

umap latin1:utf8 < data.old > data.new

But XML::Parser doesn't like data.new any better than data.old.

So I come to the monks, on bended knee. I'd be happy to get anything from a new debugging technique or an RTFM link to an outright solution. Thanks!

In reply to Generating UTF-8 from nasty high ASCII input by samtregar

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