[NOTE: this question is a spinoff of an earlier question of mine. At the time I posted that earlier question I did not realize that it actually asks about two different issues. Thanks to a comment by tripleee, I figured out the answer to one of the two. The question below limits itself to the remaining problem.]
I'll use the short demo script below to illustrate the problem.
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
use strict;
use feature 'unicode_strings';
use POSIX 'locale_h';
use locale;
use utf8;
setlocale( LC_CTYPE, 'de_DE.UTF-8' );
binmode( STDOUT, ':utf8' );
my $non_ascii = 'ßäöüÄÖÜ';
print "$non_ascii\n";
my @non_ascii = split //, $non_ascii;
print "$_\n" for @non_ascii;
$DB::single = 1; 1; # return control to DB
(The last line is effectively a breakpoint.)
OK, now I run this under the Perl debugger:
% perl -d dbtest.pl
Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.37
Editor support available.
Enter h or 'h h' for help, or 'man perldebug' for more help.
main::(dbtest.pl:8): setlocale( LC_CTYPE, 'de_DE.UTF-8' );
DB<1> c
ßäöüÄÖÜ
ß
ä
ö
ü
Ä
Ö
Ü
main::(dbtest.pl:17): $DB::single = 1; 1; # return control to DB
DB<1>
So far so good: the script produced the expected output, and now the debugger has entered into single-step mode, and is waiting for input.
At this point, print
still produces the correct (i.e. human-readable) output:
DB<1> print $non_ascii
ßäöüÄÖÜ
DB<2> print "$_\n" for @non_ascii
ß
ä
ö
ü
Ä
Ö
Ü
DB<3>
But if I now use the x
directive to pretty-print the contents of the @non_ascii
array, the output is no longer looks right:
DB<3> x \@non_ascii
0 ARRAY(0x7fab6196f790)
0 '\337'
1 '\344'
2 '\366'
3 '\374'
4 '\304'
5 '\326'
6 '\334'
DB<4> binmode( STDOUT, ':utf8' );
DB<5> x \@non_ascii
0 ARRAY(0x7fab6196f790)
0 '\337'
1 '\344'
2 '\366'
3 '\374'
4 '\304'
5 '\326'
6 '\334'
DB<6>
How can get x
to produce human-readable output?