From time to time, I saw people wondering why a piece of code does not work, just because they have “garbage” in their data. People really need a tool to inspect what their strings contain, so I just created this StringInspector class, and hope it helps.

This is how to use it: 
use StringInspector;
use strict;
my $inspector = new StringInspector;
$inspector->inspect("abcdefghijkl");
$inspector->display();

[download]
This is the package itself: 
package StringInspector;

use Hash::Util qw(lock_keys);
use strict;

sub new {
    my $self = {};
    $self->{SUSPECT} = "";
    bless $self;
    lock_keys(%{$self});
    return $self;
}

sub inspect {
    my ($self, $string) = @_;
    $self->{SUSPECT} = $string;
}

sub display {
    my $self = shift;
    for (my $index = 0; $index <= length $self->{SUSPECT}; $index += 1
+0) {
        my $ten= substr($self->{SUSPECT}, $index, 10);
        my $numbers = "";
        my $chars = "";
        for (my $this_char = 0; $this_char < length $ten; $this_char +
++) {
            my $ascii = ord(substr($ten, $this_char, 1));
            $numbers .= sprintf("0x%0x  ", $ascii);
            $chars .= (($ascii >= 32) && ($ascii <= 126)) ? substr($te
+n, $this_char, 1) : "."; 
        }
        print $numbers;
        print " " x (60 - length $numbers);
        print " " x 5;
        print $chars;
        print "\n";
    }
}

1;

[download]

In reply to Is there any garbage chars in your data? by pg

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