I do replace literal \xNN with their character in Perl?

Question

I have a Perl script that takes text values from a MySQL table and writes it to a text file. The problem is, when I open the text file for viewing I am getting a lot of hex characters like \x92 and \x93 which stands for single and double quotes, I guess.

I am using DBI->quote function to escape the special chars before writing the values to the text file. I have tried using Encode::Encoder, but with no luck. The character set on both the tables is latin1.

How do I get rid of those hex characters and get the character to show in the text file?

Answer 1

\x92 and \x93 are empty characters in the latin1 character set (see here or here). If you are certain that you are indeed dealing with latin1, you can simply delete them.

Answer 2

ISO Latin-1 does not define characters in the range 0x80 to 0x9f, so displaying these bytes in hex is expected. Most likely your data is actually encoded in Windows-1252, which is the same as Latin1 except that it defines additional characters (including left/right quotes) in this range.

Answer 3

It sounds like you need to change the character sets on the tables, or translate the non-latin-1 characters into latin-1 equivalents. I'd prefer the first solution. Get used to Unicode; you're going to have to learn it at some point. :)