Reading/writing wide characters

[Josef Moellers]

Hi,

I have an MP3 player (an iPod clone?) which stores its playlist with
wide (16 bit) characters. I'd like to manipulate the playlist using
perl. Is there a way to transparently handle wide characters so I can
read other, non-wide, files and write wide characters to the playlist?

TIA,

Josef

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

I have an MP3 player (an iPod clone?) which stores its playlist with
wide (16 bit) characters.

Possibly utf-16 (of one or other endianness)?

I'd like to manipulate the playlist using perl. Is there a way to
transparently handle wide characters so I can read other, non-wide,
files and write wide characters to the playlist?

Yes. Look into encode layers in 5.8.*, or explicit Encode calls if
in 5.6 (but better to upgrade).

Start with perluniintro and work out from there (perlunicode,
encoding, Encode ...)

Once you've assured that you can read-in what you've got, to Perl's
natural internal format, then it should be plain sailing (output
should just be the converse).