I would like to request the wisdom of the Monks on the hairy subject of UTF-8...

To fix some problems with BibTeX and UTF-8 characters, I've made a little perl-script that (among other things) should replace some UTF-8 characters by TeX-macros. The problems is that I cannot seem to get the regular expressions to recognise UTF-8 characters.

I use something like: 

while (my $line = <>) {

    $line =~ s/\x{00a9}/\\textcopyright/g;    # "©"
    $line =~ s/\x{2010}/\-/g;        # "&#8208;"
    $line =~ s/\x{fffd}/\\,/g;        # "&#65533;"
    $line =~ s/\x{03b4}/\$\\delta\$/g;    # "&#948;" 
    $line =~ s/\x{00c5}/\\AA\{\}/g;        # "Å"

    print $line;
}

[download]

It run this in Perl 5.10.0 on a 64-bit Ubuntu Jaunty system. The locale is set to en_US.UTF-8, and I checked that the input-file is really UTF-8.

When I run the script however, it seems to replace only the 8-bit ASCII characters 0xa5 and 0xc5 (resulting in invalid UTF-8 output), instead of replacing the UTF-8 ones as I intended. I tried adding "use utf8", "-CIO" and/or setting STDIN and STDOUT to ":utf8" using binmode, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

I'm a bit stuck now, does anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Best regards, Levien

In reply to Search & replace of UTF-8 characters ? by levien

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.