On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 03:35:37PM -0800, Deneb Meketa wrote: > I'm a longtime 5.005/5.6.1 user. I recently upgraded my > Linux system to RH8.0 and got perl5.8 in the bargain. I > have many perl scripts that read or write non-Unicode files, > mostly ANSI files. Many of those scripts have broken, > seemingly because of Unicode-forcing behavior in perl5.8. > > (It is possible that some other part of my system upgrade is > responsible, like maybe my shell; if anyone knows of some > kind of system-wide Unicode infestation that could be the > cause of these problems, please let me know!)
RedHat 8 defaults to setting UTF8 locales. UTF8 locales cause perl5.8 to switch to Unicode mode, because perl assumes that you meant to set a UTF8 locale. > three bytes. I understand the Unicode translation that is > happening here, I just don't want it! > What I'm reading is not a UTF-8 file - it's an ANSI file! > Is there some way to tell perl to just read the bytes without > translation? Changing your locale to not be UTF8 should stop all the translations. (Make sure that the environment variables LANG, LANGUAGE and LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE don't contain a string matching /utf-?8/i) I don't know what sets these variables on RedHat systemwide, so I don't know how to change them. My personal opinion is that it was premature of RedHat to make RedHat 8.0 *default* to using UTF8 locales, given the general state of UTF8 support in most programs running on Linux. Others may disagree. Nicholas Clark
