Perl prints junk before file

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

Hi,

I'm trying to read a file and print it, But I always get a junk value printed out in the first line.

Code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
 open (MYFILE, '2.pl');
 print <MYFILE>;
 close (MYFILE);
[download]

Output:

&#8745;&#9559;&#9488;#!/usr/local/bin/perl
 open (MYFILE, '2.pl');
 print <MYFILE>;
 close (MYFILE);
[download]

How do i get rid of that first few junk characters? If i write onto another file instead of stdout this doesn't happen..

Comment on Perl prints junk before file Select or Download Code

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Re: Perl prints junk before file by bart (Canon) on Feb 04, 2012 at 20:31 UTC
The first I thought when I read this, was "BOM marker?". But the bytes don't seem to fit.	[reply]
Re^2: Perl prints junk before file by tkly (Initiate) on Feb 04, 2012 at 21:21 UTC
Oh. i dont know how to check that. or fix it. for now i'm using substr and removing the first 3 characters. :(	[reply]
Re^3: Perl prints junk before file by bart (Canon) on Feb 04, 2012 at 21:48 UTC
3 characters? Or 3 bytes? That would be weird bytes, judging by the sample output you posted... But maybe they got converted again, after the fact. So it could be a BOM marker after all. You could try out File::BOM.	[reply]
Re^4: Perl prints junk before file by tkly (Initiate) on Feb 04, 2012 at 21:52 UTC
Re^5: Perl prints junk before file by Anonymous Monk on Feb 05, 2012 at 06:13 UTC
Re: Perl prints junk before file by oko1 (Deacon) on Feb 04, 2012 at 22:01 UTC
There's a number of hidden factors here that make direct answers to your question mostly meaningless. Without more information, there's not a whole lot to go on. How was '2.pl' created? It is possible that some weird, or corrupted version of the BOM got inserted there. What do you mean by "this doesn't happen" - are you 'cat'ting the resulting file, opening and reading it the same way as '2.pl', reading it in a text editor, or what? Depending on the answer to that, the characters may still be there but be invisible. You _do_ realize that printing a file this way is generally not a good idea, right? Not particularly relevant in this case, but snarfing the entire content of an arbitrary-sized list is a good way to whack your memory. Possible solutions: Try 'head -c 1 2.pl' to determine what, if anything, you have as the first character in your source file. Print the content to another file, then read that resulting file with the above script. See if that same thing happens. "bvi", "vim -b", or ':set list' in "vi" (or any other method of viewing the file raw) would be of help here. For Great Ghu's sake, put an ' or die' statement after your 'open'. It makes me nervous to see it sitting there naked and unprotected like that. :) -- Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. -- W. B. Yeats	[reply]
Re: Perl prints junk before file by choroba (Cardinal) on Feb 04, 2012 at 21:07 UTC
Very strange. Google has some hits on the sequence, most of them related to bittorents. I have no idea what it could mean.	[reply]
Re: Perl prints junk before file by chessgui (Scribe) on Feb 04, 2012 at 20:57 UTC
Try this (I can gaurantee that the junk characters will disappear): `unlink('2.pl');` [download] ...together with the file...	[reply] [d/l]