LPM: Perl 5.8.0 and UTF-8 warnings

Gregg Casillo gcasillo at ket.org
Mon Mar 10 12:01:18 CST 2003


I'm building a server for a new project we've taken on, and after 
install Perl, Apache, and mod_perl, I am now in the process of fetching 
and compiling Perl modules. Several modules, Date::Manip being one 
example, are complaining with the following warning:

Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x73, 
immediately after start byte 0xe0)

The hex numbers vary, but I'm getting these warnings regularly with some 
modules. From a google search on the matter, Gerald Richters noted:

"The binary test outputs binary data and Perl interprets it as utf-8. 
Since this is not utf-8, but only some binary bytes, Perl complains 
about bad utf-8 character.

I am not quite sure why Perl things that the data is utf-8 and how this 
affects chars above 0x7f in your real applications.

I will see if I get the same error with Perl 5.8.0, but it might depend 
on your settings when Perl 5.8.0 was compiled"

I was wondering if anybody on this list knew more about this. I suppose 
one solution would be to start over using Perl 5.6.1 instead, but I'd 
rather avoid losing the time invested to get to this point if a solution 
or workaround exists.

Thanks,
Gregg Casillo
Web Programmer
Kentucky Educational Television





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