Re: Git-mediawiki : Encoding problems in perl

On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 03:45:43PM +0200, Jérémie NIKAES wrote:

my $mw = MediaWiki::API->new();
$mw->edit( {
        action => 'edit',
        title => 'Main_page',
        text => 'été',
} ) ;
[...]
While googling (a lot), I found that utf8 was pretty tricky in perl...
The only thing that seems to solve things is a simple addition of 'use
encoding utf8' at the top of our script.
However
A) Adding this line requires that I remove 'use strict;'
B) I found some information about this pragma encoding and it seems to
be unadvised to use it

From the "utf8" man page:

  Do not use this pragma for anything else than telling Perl that your
  script is written in UTF-8.

which is what you are doing here, since you are telling perl that the
string constant is in utf8. So from my understanding, "use utf8" is the
right solution.

That being said, this is probably just a small test case, and you are
more likely to be reading the data from a file.

For file contents, you can use:

  binmode($handle, ":utf8");

to read everything in as utf8.

For file names themselves, I think it depends where you get them.
Presumably from readdir() or from a glob. I think you can use
utf8::upgrade($string) on the result to make sure they are interpreted
as utf8 (if you already know that is how the bytes in the filename
should be interpreted).

But I admit I am not an expert on such matters, and every time I do utf8
things in perl, I end up with a lot of trial and error.

-Peff