in reply to Re^4: Help with RC4
in thread Help with RC4

Well, yeah, but that's for the sake of portability with OSen that do make the distinction between text and binary. Unix (and Linux) make no such distinction. Also, his data is good 'ol 7-bit ASCII. Why should he have difficulty reading that regardless of binmode? And why should setting LANG to 'C' address the problem? (I've tested it. It does.)

It's a bug. It's either a Perl bug in 5.8.0 or a bug in Red Hat's implementation on RHEL3. They have stepped up to fix this in U3. I've tested the patch that fixes the problem.

"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there." - Will Rogers

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Re^6: Help with RC4
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Jul 26, 2004 at 10:45 UTC
    No, this is not a bug. perl-5.8.x has many improvements over perl-5.6.x, so if you're going to be using perl-5.8.x, you need to learn what those are.

    5.6 had only 2 IO disciplines: ":crlf" (the default) and ":raw" (binmode) and did not support unicode properly. 5.8 has support for other disciplines including utf8.

    `perldoc perl58delta' (emphasis mine)

    ...
    * If your environment variables (LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG) look like you want to use UTF-8 (any of the the variables match "/utf-?8/i"), your STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR handles and the default open layer (see open) are marked as UTF-8. (This feature, like other new features that combine Unicode and I/O, work only if you are using PerlIO, but that's the default.)

    Note that after this Perl really does assume that everything is UTF-8: for example if some input handle is not, Perl will probably very soon complain about the input data like this "Malformed UTF-8 ..." since any old eight-bit data is not legal UTF-8.

    Note for code authors: if you want to enable your users to use UTF-8 as their default encoding but in your code still have eight-bit I/O streams (such as images or zip files), you need to explicitly open() or binmode() with ":bytes" (see "open" in perlfunc and "binmode" in perlfunc), or you can just use "binmode(FH)" (nice for pre-5.8.0 backward compatibility). ...

    MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
    I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
    ** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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