Apologies if this has been discussed ad nauseum before. I looked at some previous perl-unicode messages on related topics, and tried a few things I found there and on perldoc.com with no success. Here's the deal:
OS: Linux Red Hat 8.0 (I didn't install it) Perl: 5.8.0 (I didn't build it) Data: GDS-2 layout database (a REAL binary file)
It seems there's a conspiracy between Red Hat 8 and Perl 5.8.0 where Red Hat sets the LANG env var by default, and seeing that, Perl is insisting that every file it opens be handled as Unicode. ;=( I don't want Unicode. The data files give me the "Malformed Unicode Character" message when I try to process them on Linux.
I know the most reliable way to avoid this is to "unsetenv LANG" before running the script. I know I can check for this and make the script "die" with the appropriate message. What I'm looking for is a reliable way to disable utf8 after the script has already started so I don't have to annoy all the users with this. I have already tried all of the following with no joy:
use encoding "latin1"; use open ':encoding(raw)'; no utf8;
Etc. etc. Note that ":bytes" and "binmode" do nothing on Unix. This is really frustrating. Any help would be appreciated.
Regards,
Simon Favre
