What have I done to get such a strange encoding in this path-name?
In my file manager (Dolphin) the path-name looks good.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use 5.014;
use utf8;
use open qw( :encoding(UTF-8) :std );
use File::Find;
use Devel::Peek;
use Encode qw(decode);
my $string;
find( sub { $string = $File::Find::name }, 'Delibes, Léo' );
$string =~ s|Delibes,\ ||;
$string =~ s|\..*\z||;
my ( $s1, $s2 ) = split m|/|, $string, 2;
say Dump $s1;
say Dump $s2;
# SV = PV(0x824b50) at 0x9346d8
# REFCNT = 1
# FLAGS = (PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
# PV = 0x93da30 "L\303\251o"\0 [UTF8 "L\x{e9}o"]
# CUR = 4
# LEN = 16
# SV = PV(0x7a7150) at 0x934c30
# REFCNT = 1
# FLAGS = (PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
# PV = 0x7781e0 "Lakm\303\203\302\251"\0 [UTF8 "Lakm\x{c3}\x{a9}"]
# CUR = 8
# LEN = 16
say $s1;
say $s2;
# Léo
# Lakmé
$s1 = decode( 'utf-8', $s1 );
$s2 = decode( 'utf-8', $s2 );
say $s1;
say $s2;
# L�o
# Lakmé
Unfortunately your operating system's pathname API is another "binary interface" where you will have to use Encode::encode
and Encode::decode
to get predictable results.
Most operating systems treat pathnames as a sequence of octets (i.e. bytes). Whether that sequence should be interpreted as latin-1, UTF-8 or other character encoding is an application decision. Consequently the value returned by readdir()
is simply a sequence of octets, and File::Find
doesn't know that you want the path name as Unicode code points. It forms $File::Find::name
by simply concatenating the directory path (which you supplied) with the value returned by your OS via readdir()
, and that's how you got code points mashed with octets.
Rule of thumb: Whenever passing path names to the OS, Encode::encode()
it to make sure it is a sequence of octets. When getting a path name from the OS, Encode::decode()
it to the character set that your application wants it in.
You can make your program work by calling find
this way:
find( sub { ... }, Encode::encode('utf8', 'Delibes, Léo') );
And then calling Encode::decode()
when using the value of $File::Find::name
:
my $path = Encode::decode('utf8', $File::Find::name);
To be more clear, this is how $File::Find::name
was formed:
use Encode;
# This is a way to get $dir to be represented as a UTF-8 string
my $dir = 'L' .chr(233).'o'.chr(256);
chop $dir;
say "dir: ", d($dir); # length = 3
# This is what readdir() is returning:
my $leaf = encode('utf8', 'Lakem' . chr(233));
say "leaf: ", d($leaf); # length = 7
$File::Find::name = $dir . '/' . $leaf;
say "File::Find::name: ", d($File::Find::name);
sub d {
join(' ', map { sprintf("%02X", ord($_)) } split('', $_[0]))
}
The POSIX filesystem API is broken as no encoding is enforced. Period.
Many problems can happen. For example a pathname can even contain both latin1 and UTF-8 depending on how various filesystems on a path handle encoding (and if they do).