I'm guessing that the output text string is actually not ASCII data, but rather is encoded as UTF-16LE -- 2-byte unicode characters, in which all the characters happen to be in the ASCII range (U0000 - U007f), so the second (high) byte is always null. Meanwhile, your display window is (mercifully) interpreting null bytes as spaces (as opposed to doing something really nasty or stupid).

You should look at "Encode" man page (and probably "perlunicode" and even "perluniintro", for a well-rounded education). The thing you need to do is "decode" that text string from UTF-16LE into perl's native utf8. Assuming the string really is just ASCII characters, nothing else should be necessary -- it so happens that ASCII is now a proper subset (a very small subset) of utf8. Supposing you assign the string in question to a scalar, say $comstring, you could convert it for proper display with something like this: 

use Encode;

...

my $displayable = decode( 'UTF-16LE', $comstring );

print $displayable;

...

[download]

In reply to Re: Extra spaces in COM strings to stdout? by graff
in thread Extra spaces in COM strings to stdout? by Anonymous Monk

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.