What "Wide character in print" means in Perl (hint: UTF8)

 It means there is a glitch in the matrix - agents are coming!

(further reading)

Find dodgy characters in a file

This will print any characters with values higher than 127, i.e. non-ascii characters that might look like ascii, but really be breaking your processor.

perl -lne'while (my ($c) = $_ =~ m{^(.)}) { print "$c = ".ord($c) if ord($c) > 127; $_ =~ s/^.// }' file_to_check.something


A quick, manual way to confirm some characters really are what you think they are:

cat file_to_check.something | od -bc

Convert a string to UTF8

If the string is in iso-8859-1 encoding:

my $string_iso_8859_1 = decode("iso-8859-1", $string);
my $string_utf8 = encode("utf8", $string_iso_8859_1);