Hi Chas., Jenda,
On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 6:00 PM, Chas. Owens <chas.ow...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 04:50, Jenda Krynicky <je...@krynicky.cz> wrote: > > From: Raymond Wan <rwan.w...@gmail.com> > >> I'm on a Linux system too; I guess I've used it for so long, I forgot > about > >> the situations when binary/text does matter (i.e., Windows). I see...so > it > >> doesn't matter. That would make sense since I just pipe to stdout > right > >> now and whether I'm sending "text" [ie., human-readable characters] or > not, > >> it all seems to work fine... > > > > Well ... it seems, but it doesn't have to. Based on the locale > > settings, if you do not binmode() the filehandle or open it with the > > right IO layer specified, the stuff you print may undergo some > > charset conversions. > > > > perldoc -f binmode says > > > > On some systems (in general, DOS and Windows-based systems) binmode() > > is necessary when you're not working with a text file. For the sake > > of portability it is a good idea to always use it when appropriate, > > and to never use it when it isn't appropriate. Also, people can set > > their I/O to be by default UTF-8 encoded Unicode, not bytes. > > > > In other words: regardless of platform, use binmode() on binary data, > > like for example images. > snip > > or the more modern: > > open my $fh, ">:raw", $filename > or die "could not open $filename: $!"; > > from perldoc perlio[1] > The :raw layer is defined as being identical to calling > binmode($fh) - the stream is made suitable for passing > binary data i.e. each byte is passed as-is. The stream > will still be buffered. > > 1. http://perldoc.perl.org/PerlIO.html > > I see. I'm not writing image data, but my own data (sequence of 4-byte integers), so I guess I should be using binmode anyway. So, of the two (binmode and :raw), the latter is the newer/more modern method? With so many ways to do things in Perl, I often don't know which one is the more accepted one. Thank you! I'll be sure to use :raw, even if I'm just writing to stdout. Ray
