http://norman.walsh.name/2004/05/11/perlBug 7 80 2004-05-11T17:30:00-04:00 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh Something has changed in Perl 5.8.4 that breaks my conduits, maybe yours. (Updated: a little debugging after all.) I upgraded today (apt-get rocks) and got Perl 5.8.4. Something has gone horribly wrong in my Palm XML Conduits. It’s got something to do with Unicode and ISO-8859-1 characters and Data::Dumper and maybe some of my own code. The publicly available conduits are much older than the ones I’m running (I’m way overdue for a new release), but I suggest you tread carefully. I’m not likely to have time to investigate in the immediate future. For the moment, I’ll probably hack some ASCII encoding of the characters together. Ugh. Yes, I’m sure I should report the bug somewhere, but I just can’t scrape together the time. Ugh.

I’m on the road again this week, so I scraped together a couple of extra hours and did a little debugging. It appears to be have been related to my use of XML::DOM::encodeText(…) and XML::DOM::XmlUtf8Encode(…). After a little shotgun debugging and reading about Perl Unicode support, I replaced the former with unpack("U0U*", …) and the latter with pack("U", …). That’s made the problem go away, which is sort of like solving the problem. Sort of. Anyway, that’s where I’m going to stop. (btw, the upgrade in question was from Perl 5.8.3 to Perl 5.8.4, nothing as dramatic as going from 5.6 or something.)