thanks, the pointer got me thinking, turns out I was loading from xml, where the encoding is utf-8, however I realised I could just convert these into utf8/latin1 perls internal data representation. Is that understanding correct?

so when I use the following code things start working, if anyone has any other wisdom regarding exactly what is happening here that would be awesome. 

    utf8::decode($newOpMode);

    print length($newOpMode) . " $newOpMode ---" . length ($self->setT
+heOpMode) . " " . $self->setTheOpMode."\n";

    $return = 1 if ( (lc( $newOpMode )) eq "mitigate" );

[download]

http://perldoc.perl.org/utf8.html

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlunifaq.html

In reply to Re^2: panic: swash_fetch on passing a string to lc by irishBatman
in thread panic: swash_fetch on passing a string to lc by irishBatman

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.