Re: Trying to write a subroutine to return if file is Text or Binary

in reply to Trying to write a subroutine to return if file is Text or Binary

I was playing around with this and expecting to post something clever about how -B doesn't mean binary - according to the documentation it means "not ASCII", which ain't the same as binary. However ...

$ perl -v
This is perl, v5.8.8
$ cat foo
[download]

文本

 (this is apparently Chinese for "text")
$ perl -e 'print -T "foo"'
1
$ perl -e 'print -B "foo"'
$
[download]

So even as far back as 5.8.8 it DTRT, although the documentation is wrong.

Update: sorry for the bad formatting - perlmonks doesn't like me cutting and pasting funny foreign characters into a <code> block.

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Re^2: Trying to write a subroutine to return if file is Text or Binary by csorrentini (Acolyte) on Jun 26, 2014 at 17:05 UTC
Thank you all for the quick replies. After posting this I realized how I was completely overlooking the fact that it is still considered text even putting zeroes and ones in the file. Essentially all I wanted was it to return text file if sending something like a .txt doc or something similar and return binary file IF a binary file was sent to it and it works like a charm. Again, thanks all	[reply]
Re^3: Trying to write a subroutine to return if file is Text or Binary by DrHyde (Prior) on Jul 02, 2014 at 10:14 UTC
After posting I went to p5p and asked "WTF?". Apparently there is work going on (whether it'll be accepted and whether it'll be in 5.22 or not remains to be seen) to improve -T and -B. See here and here.	[reply]

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