Sorry, UTF-8 was a typo.

I've submitted unasnwered requests to technical support for the software that generates the logs that I'm reading to tell me the encoding. I may never know it, but that doesn't mean that I get to give-up.

Using <:encoding(UTF-16) has worked nicely for a couple of months, then suddenly I started having problems (i.e., malformed HI surrogate). I don't care if I have to skip one record, I just don't want Perl to die.

I switched to decode(UTF-16), however, while Perl doesn't die, it now behaves differently. The output seems to have a space between every char, which I think implies that the encoding is wrong, but why does it work with <:encoding.

Here are my two programs that I thought would be the same:

my $file = shift;
my $enc = "UTF-16";
open(FILE, "<:encoding($enc)", $file) || die("Can't: $!");
while ( <FILE> ) {
    print;
}    
close(FILE);

[download]
my $file = shift;
my $enc = "UTF-16";
open(FILE,$file) || die("Can't: $!");
while ( <FILE> ) {
    my $str = decode($enc,$_);
    print encode($enc,$str);
}    
close(FILE);

[download]

The first technique worked well for a couple of months, but now I'm getting some new chars on which it dies. The second one doesn't die, but I can't regex an of the text. Any other thoughts?

I appreciate your help thus far. My knowledge is obviously limited with regards to encoding. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

In reply to Re^4: Decoding bad UTF-16 by gregality
in thread Decoding bad UTF-16 by gregality

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