I had with strings containing numbers and some other leading mystery character as being evaluated as having a numerical value of 0.
's advice did get rid of one error that was the cause of Perl thinking my delimited text files were in UTF-8 format. Since then I still experienced the problem and have traced the mystery character to whatever HTML uses as a nonbreaking space character ("&"."nbsp;"). Anyone know why Perl 5.8 on my Unix box can't force numbers preceded by this character to behave as numbers (ex. "&" . "nbsp;7" == 0), but Perl 5.6 on my WinNT can? Anyone have a script for stripping this character out of text files?
Your help is much appreciated, Thanks,
Carl