On Fri, Aug 28, 2026 at 09:04:32PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> Yes, this kind of change in the output files is not an improvement:
>
> It makes it harder to actually see what is in the output. Even though an
> Info file is a "binary" output format, it does not mean that it doesn't matter
> if the test output is unreadable.
>
> Is there any way of getting back using UTF-8 in the reference test
> files rather than the escape sequences with \x?
>
> Could we wrap the strings with UTF-8 in them in a function call, like
> instead of "error\xe2\x86\x92" we have something like
> utf8::encode("error→") which should have the same value?
It is possible (actually this is not needed by the strings already UTF-8
encoded, but for all the other strings, that are character strings). I
would have preferred to avoid, but this is probably the best thing to
do (we do something like that in Texinfo for input reading).
> Another idea is to specify "no utf8;" instead of "use utf8;" for sections
> of the test results files so that string literals are interpreted as
> byte strings (i.e. with the UTF-8 flag off).
This is not the problem here, it is not about reading the resulting file
in Perl, but generating it. Reading the resulting file in Perl may
also be problematic, actually, as you say it should be possible to wrap
in the utf8::encode or similar to make it work.
> Generally I have found it harder in the past to investigate test results
> when they are in separate output files rather than the *.pl files under
> tta/perl/t/results.
Ok.
--
Pat
