I'm writing a Perl/Tk (ActivePerl 8.4/WinXP) app that requires the display of negative numbers. The minus sign (-) seemed a little anemic, so I decided to replace all occurences of it with an n-dash (–), using the substitution s/-/\x96/g . The substitution occurs okay; however I don't get an n-dash, but rather a thick vertical bar. I tried other fonts: same result. Exploring further, I discovered that Tk displays the same vertical bar in all fonts for characters "\x80" to "\x9f", even though those fonts clearly include normal characters in that range. Beyond "\x9f" things return to normal.

So what's going on here? Is it a bug? Some Unicode thing I haven't yet grasped? I'm at a loss.

Update: Fixed HTML formatting error in n-dash literal.

In reply to Perl/Tk Font Weirdness by Dr. Mu

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