Hello all,
I have a perl script which uses RATLPERL (from IBM Rational) which is on version 5.8.6

The script does the following. It takes each record using API's provided by IBM and forms a XML. I use XML Smart parser for this task.

The output enbcoding of the XML is UTF-8 (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>)

I have all sorts of special characters like ü ä ö µ € ² ³. Since the output xml has to be utf-8, I use unicode::UTF8simple from CPAN. The reason for this was the inital version of RATLPERL which was on v 5.6.1 of perl, didnt had full support for utf/unicode

So this is what i do. When i insert the data into tables, i use this 

#Convert from UTF-8 from input XML 
use unicode::UTF8simple;
my $uref = new Unicode::UTF8simple;
my $str_var = $uref->fromUTF8("windows-1256",<XMLNODE>)
#$str_var->Goes to database column
 
while getting it back from database to put into XML i use 
#Convert to UTF-8 for outpu XML
use unicode::UTF8simple;
my $uref = new Unicode::UTF8simple;
my $strvar = $uref->toUTF8("windows-1256",<XMLNODE>)

[download]


The above code does not work always. Sometimes it throws error which i am unable to trace.

unicode::UTF8simple was mainly created for supporing utf from perl v 5.00 to 5.6 (as per the info in CPAN)

Since we have to ues new version of RATLPERL which is on 5.8.6, I was wondering if there are any other better way of converting my database values to utf-8 and viceversa.

I am running this script under Windows 2003 & XP.

Thanks a lot for your time

KK

In reply to UTF in Perl by KarthikK

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