[Catalyst] CSV / UTF-8 / Unicode

[Craig Chant]

Hi Lars,

Thanks for the reply....

>> The problem is rather that Catalyst::Response::body wants octets

Sorry, you've lost me, I thought response body wanted an IO::File Handle which is what I have given it?

I was also under the impression that $c->response->body( 'Page not found' ); was acceptable and that is also a char string not octet?

I seem to be missing something here, please can you elaborate.

>> encode the content again for output as UTF-8

Isn't that what $iof->binmode(":encoding(UTF-8)");  does?

I thought all strings in perl were Unicode ? or at least that's what the Unicode::Encoding plugin is for isnt' it?

I have in my app ....

use Catalyst qw/
    Unicode::Encoding
/;

What's the purpose of this Catgalyst plugin if it isn't making my app Unicode?

How do I encode a string to unicode if it isn't already?

>         # close file
>         undef $iof;
>> That's not necessary. When the reference falls out of scope, the destructor that closes the file is called automatically.

Does it do any harm? Is there an issue with cleaning up your own object references?

I thought it was good practice to clean up your own references , even if auto garbage collection *might* do it for you? It's a habit I have from VBA / VB.NET, am I doing something bad?

>> PS: IO::File does not throw exceptions when the file could not be read.
>> Instead I recommend to use the `open` built-in in conjuction

Please note there is no file to be read , this is utilising Perl 5+'s ability to use a string as a file handle.

There will always be a string, even if it is empty so the exported XLS will be a blank spread sheet.

I think all I need to do is understand how I encode the string before giving it to IO::File

Your help is appreciated.

Regards,
Craig.



-----Original Message-----
From: Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯 [mailto:daxim at cpan.org]
Sent: 02 July 2013 10:06
To: catalyst at lists.scsys.co.uk
Subject: Re: [Catalyst] CSV / UTF-8 / Unicode

> I seem to be having major problems getting the application devel
> server (my_app_server.pl) to accept an IO::File Handle as CSV and
> correctly encode as UTF-8.
No, the code does exactly what you said. The problem is rather that Catalyst::Response::body wants octets, not characters. Either pass the handle through in raw mode, or encode the content again for output as UTF-8. If the input file is not under your control, I recommend going through a manual decoding/encoding step instead of IO layers, and make decoding errors fatal (see FB_CROAK in <http://p3rl.org/Encode>) in order to catch malformed encoding before it's delivered to the client.
One can't be too careful.

>         # close file
>         undef $iof;
That's not necessary. When the reference falls out of scope, the destructor that closes the file is called automatically.

PS: IO::File does not throw exceptions when the file could not be read.
Instead I recommend to use the `open` built-in in conjuction with <http://p3rl.org/autodie> for better error checking.
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