jeanluca has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks

I've a small script that replaces characters inside a file, like:
open IN,"$_" or die "Could not read file\n" ;

local $/ ;
my $file = <IN> ; # read file
close IN ;

$file =~ s/$ARGV[1]/$ARGV[2]/g ;

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For some files the following exception was generated:
Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x20, imme
+diately after start byte 0xe9) in substitution iterator at ./myscript
+.pl line 23

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Any suggestions what went wrong here ?

Thanks in advance
Luca

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Malformed UTF-8 character
by Realbot (Scribe) on Mar 14, 2006 at 14:14 UTC
    You probably have some strings with high-bits set in them. Find out what their encoding is and then apply 
    use Encode;
my $perl_string = decode(<encoding>, $original_string);

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    where <encoding> can be "iso-8859-1", "utf8" of one of the other encodings available...see Encode help.
    Then you can apply s//

    Regards.
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[d/l]
      OK, thanks. Do you know some ulrs where I can read more about this (iso-88..., utf8) so I will get a better understing of what it means ?

      Luca
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