Malformed UTF-8 character

Stegalex has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I just upgraded my server to RH Linux 8.0 with perl 5.8.0 and all of a sudden many of my "stable" scripts are producing the following message:

Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0x99, with no 
+preceding start byte) in substitution iterator at...".
[download]

It seems to happen in scripts where I am doing a

use Date::Manip qw(ParseDate UnixDate);
[download]

wherein I am only using parts of a module. Any ideas?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I like chicken.

Comment on Malformed UTF-8 character Select or Download Code

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Re: Malformed UTF-8 character by graff (Chancellor) on Nov 20, 2002 at 02:05 UTC
You should check the 5.8.0 man pages "utf", "perlunicode", and probably "perluniintro" as well. Given that you're migrating older scripts for things that have nothing to do with using unicode data, it should suffice to put: `no utf8;` [download] near the top of each script (e.g. above "use Date::Manip"). I just added Date::Manip to my 5.8.0 installation and tried a couple of sample operations from the man page, involving the two methods you mentioned. No problem. Is there any chance that your Date::Manip.pm file is actually a layover from an older perl version -- that is, after installing 5.8.0, did you reinstall Date::Manip? Apart from that, I don't know what to say... maybe if you put up a minimal script that generates the problem for you, and we'll have something more concrete to work with.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Malformed UTF-8 character by Anonymous Monk on Nov 20, 2002 at 14:20 UTC
I don't think it's anything wrong with Date::Manip, but rather somethine wrong with RedHat 8.0. I have perl 5.8.0 on my solaris box and it doesn't have a problem with my Date::Manip scripts. But my desktop with RH8 does. I started a bug on redhat's bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=74884	[reply]
Re: Malformed UTF-8 character by jmcnamara (Monsignor) on Nov 20, 2002 at 10:01 UTC
There seems to be related to the Unicode issues highlighted in Problems with RedHat 8 from a recent perl5 porters summary. -- John.	[reply]
Re: Re: Malformed UTF-8 character by graff (Chancellor) on Nov 21, 2002 at 01:42 UTC
Maybe that explains why I didn't see a problem -- I was on SuSE linux.	[reply]
Re: Malformed UTF-8 character by Notromda (Pilgrim) on Nov 21, 2002 at 16:03 UTC
I have run into all sorts of problems related to this. The environment variable: $LANG is set to en_US.UTF-8. Many programs do not know how to use this; nedit seg faults, Net::Ldap hangs, as I discovered earlier. I changed all my $LANG environment variables to simply en_US, and all seems to be good again. I would like to see a better solution, though.	[reply]
Re: Re: Malformed UTF-8 character by crazysniffable (Acolyte) on May 27, 2003 at 21:23 UTC
Using use bytes; helped quiet the noise for my Solaris setup.	[reply]


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