(Presuming the file actually is in UCS-2le or UTF-16le encoding (which is likely) ...)

If you need/want to stick with 5.6.1, you could use the following crude hack: 

$/="\n\0";

while (my $line = <>) {
    print pack("C*", map $_ & 0xff, unpack("v*",$line));
}

[download]

This would simply remove all the high-bytes (what appears as extra "spaces" — actually those spaces are zero bytes for all chars with ordinal value <= 0xff).  As the sample text you've shown only seems to contain plain ASCII characters, this approach should work pretty well.

Another option with 5.6.1 would be the module Unicode::String: 

use Unicode::String qw(utf16le);

$/="\n\0";

while (my $line = <>) {
    print utf16le($line)->latin1();

    # or, if you want UTF-8 output:
    # print utf16le($line)->utf8();
}

[download]

The problem with Unicode::String is that it doesn't ship with 5.6.1 by default, so you'd somehow have to get hold of it (for v5.6.1!), or build it yourself. OTOH, as Unicode::String is an XS module that needs a working compiler environment set up, etc., I would not recommend the latter (unless you're familiar with the procedure...). It's most likely easier to use the crude hack...

(I tried both approaches with an old perl-5.6.0, so I'm pretty sure they should work with 5.6.1, too)

In reply to Re: Mysterious Whitespaces between each character in a file (hack for 5.6.x) by almut
in thread Mysterious Whitespaces between each character in a file by 1wax

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