Hello,

We had been using XML::Writer under Perl 5.6.0 for a while. We are now in the process of upgrading to Perl 5.8.5.

Our source XML documents often contain UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters and we found that XML::Writer in not creating the same characters that it used to. One problem character that we found is — (I understand that there has been significant unicode changes in recent versions of Perl).

Here is what we get (viewed with `less`) after 'converting it to utf-8' from just printing the XML and what the XML::Writer produces: 
  XML output via 'print':      <test><C2><97></test>
  XML output via XML::Writer:  <test><97></test>

[download]

The 'solution' we came up with was to add:

  binmode($FILE_HANDLE, ":encoding(utf-8)");

to the Writer.pm just after it picks up the file handle like: 

                                # Set the output.
    if ($params{'OUTPUT'}) {binmode ($params{'OUTPUT'}, ":encoding(utf
+-8)"); }
    &{$self->{'SETOUTPUT'}}($params{'OUTPUT'});

[download]

So, is this a valid fix or is it going to give us additional problems later on? If this is a valid patch can someone explain why?

Thanks,
josh

In reply to problem with XML::Writer, unicode and Perl 5.6.0 upgrade by santellij

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