in reply to Re^2: perplexing inconsistency using RC4 and unpack
in thread perplexing inconsistency using RC4 and unpack

You are suffering from UTF-8 expansion: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -wl

print unpack "U0H*", "\x{BF}";
print unpack "U0H*", "\x{FF}";
print unpack "U0H*", "\x{FA}";
__END__
c2bf
c3bf
c3ba

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Now you just need to figure out where the UTF-8 expansion is sneaking in.

- tye        

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Re^4: perplexing inconsistency using RC4 and unpack (UTF-8)
by oddmedley (Novice) on Aug 01, 2009 at 14:44 UTC
    thank you tye, that was extremely helpful. seems I had an issue with a blank string being converted to a hash somewhere in an XML parsing phase, which was later cast to a string (which seemed to make perl guess it was a UTF8 one). several concatenations later what looked like a nice plan ascii string, actually wasn't. the solution? specify my input more rigorously:
      if($options->{'customerpass'} && (ref $options->{'customerpass'} ne 
+"HASH")){
    $options->{'customerpass'} = encode("iso-8859-1", $options->{'cust
+omerpass'});
  }else{
    $options->{'customerpass'} = '';
  }

    [download]
    leaves nothing to guess work and fixed my problem. (this call to encode ( use Encode; ) basically says (I think), 'whatever it looks like, this string is latin1 ascii, end of story.' no more utf8 expansion!)
    thanks for the help!
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