£ character changing to u.

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I have an array with various characters stored in it. When i access the English pound symbol (£), Perl seems to be interpreting it as a u letter with a squiggle across the top. Its fine when i actually type the pound sign at the command prompt, the problem only occurs when the script is run.

Any help greatly appreciated, thanx,

 

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I'm guessing it's because Perl uses Unicode, not normal ASCII. The Unicode value for £ is 00A3, if that helps. If that doesn't work for you, check here.

 

try what Michael said... i had a similar problem in Java... just trying to find what i did to fix it!

 

This is what im using to test[
CODE]my @char=qw($ & £ & $ &);
print("$char[2]");[/CODE]

Ive tried inserting \u{00A3} instead of £ but it just prints out \u{00A3} instead.

Ive also tried \x{A3}, with the same result as above.

 

This is a standard problem if you aren't careful about character sets and 'locale'.

You don't say what OS and version this is - or how you are displaying the results.

I've just tried your code on a Putty session to a FreeBSD box (because that is where I have perl installed) and it worked as you would expect.

What actual character are you getting? Is it ú, û, ü or ũ, or something else?

As far as I know Perl doesn't normaly use Unicode (it is Java that does), but uses ISO 8859 of whatever flavour happens to be set in the environment.

Use of characters outside of standard 'ASCII' is always fraught with problems unless you control the environment carefully.

Harry.

 

the symbol im getting is the first one you said(ú,).
os=Win98
regional settings=English(UK)
currency symbol=£
position(whatever that is)=1.1 with a funny symbol in front

 

Perl came with Unicode support around version 5.8. Just throwing that suggestion out there, since others have had that same issue with display of £ with Unicode.

In any case, you are correct about different character sets. If it's not Unicode, it's something other than standard ASCII.

 

Aha! Then I think I know what is happening. You are probably doing this in a DOS box?

If so the problem is because your DOS box is set to display using the old CodePage system - CP850 perhaps. This had completely different mappings for characters with the top bit set.

I'll have to dig some old docs out on how to fix this.

Harry.

 

Yes - after my previous post I double checked, and I see that 5.6 introduced Unicode support. However I see that it has to be explicitly switched on.

Harry.

 

How do i go about doing that exactly?

 

I doubt that it would help, as Win98 doesn't really support Unicode.

As my dinner this evening degenerated into serious drinking I'm not in a position to look much up at the moment. I'll take a look in the morning!

Harry.

 

I've now had a chance to boot my Win98SE box and have a play. As I thought, the DOS box uses CP850 by default rather than CP1252.

I am assuming that you are editing the code in something like wordpad, and running it in a DOS box. If this is not the case *please* tell me so I can revisit this.

You have the following choices:
1) Don't do that! (i.e. - if you are learning perl steer clear of non-ASCII characters like £)
2) Edit the code in a DOS box using EDIT - this will use CP850 character set by default so the code when run will look right.
3) (Messy) replace the DOS box font with one that uses CP1252. This will have the side effect of possibly making anything else run in the DOS box look wrong, particularly if it uses the line-drawing characters.

Harry.

 

Brilliant Harry, you are a genious, thanks LOOOADS.