Unicode has been torturing me for about a decade I guess.

I have read everything about it in perldoc and in various module's man pages, several times, but it's just too much. Every time, I have to re-read the docs and try many different things before it somehow works for one specific problem. Next time, something is different, and the whole reading-trying cycles start again. It drives me mad.

Isn't there a simple cheat sheet or diagram somewhere which would help me find the solution faster?

My current specific problem is:

The output is UTF8!

(I didn't expect having a Unicode problem this time, since everything is Latin1)

Using the same script with the same input file on another machine with a UTF8 locale and Perl 5.10, the output is Latin1!! Probably just to annoy me, some gremlin goes to great lengths to ensure I get the wrong output...

The great solution which I dream of is a web form where I input my specifics (perl version, input source and encoding, wanted output destination and encoding), and get the answer of what I need to do (which module to load, when to decode or encode, etc.).

In reply to Unicode nightmare: is there a cheat sheet or solutions diagram? by rduke15

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