Re: DateTime locale names and wide characters

On Fri, 18 Jan 2013, Shane McCarron wrote:

> The @data list is then sorted (by desc) and used to populate a <select>
> element in a web form.  Here's the weird thing.  When I am using this under
> Apache on a Linux platform in a CGI application, I get a warning that I am
> printing 'wide characters' when I use data from the 'desc' as the content
> of an 'option' element.  What I *think* is that the data coming out of
> DateTime::Locale is not properly encoded as Perl's utf8 internal encoding.
> If I take the outout of the name() and native_name() methods and encode
> them using "Encode", then it no longer complains.  Is this expected
> behavior?

I think you have the cause a bit backwards.

That warning means that you're printing data marked as UTF-8 to an output 
that expects to receive binary data. By default, all handles expect 
binary.

Calling Encode::encode() turns Perl's UTF-8 flag _off_. I've always found 
this use of encode (and decode) confusing, since I'd expect encoding to 
produce UTF-8, which it does, but it produces _bytes_.

The solution you're using is probably not the best idea. It's better to 
mark your output filehandle as UTF-8 with binmode() or by passing a layer 
to open:

   open my $fh, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', ...;

In a webapp, you're probably printing to STDOUT so you can use binmode:

   binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

I'm not sure how this will interact with mod_perl's tying of STDOUT, 
though.


-dave

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