I would just switch the open mode, depending on whether it's a 2005 or pre-2005 logfile. In its most simple case, looking for the "2005" in the pathname 

my $openmode = $sqlErrorlog =~ /2005/ ? ">:encoding(utf-16)" : ">";

unless (open LOG, $openmode, $sqlErrorlog) { ...

[download]

(or, as a refinement, you could also check if the year is >= 2005 — presuming they switched to unicode with SQL Server 2005, and future versions will adhere to the same naming scheme, i.e. 2007, 2009, ...   though that might be too many presumptions :)

However, that approach is kinda cheating, and not generally recommended programming practice (reason: when you/someone happens to change the pathname some time in the future, it's very unlikely you're going to remember this curious dependency buried deep down in the code...).

So, another way would be to test for the existence of the BOM, and if there, set UTF-16 mode. Actually - as I only recently learned myself - there's already a module for this: File::BOM, which handles the issue even more generally... (see the docs for examples).

In reply to Re^5: How to open SQL 2005 errorlog? by almut
in thread How to open SQL 2005 errorlog? by jc7

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