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Perl less that 5.8.8 required

This bug was tracked down by Sam and it was fixed in CVS on 19 June 2006 (revision 1.3.2.41): https://lists.webarch.co.uk/pipermail/mkdoc-commit/2006-June/001128.html however this fix resulted in only US-ASCII content working with MKDoc so it was reverted by Chris (revision 1.3.2.42): https://lists.webarch.co.uk/pipermail/mkdoc-commit/2006-July/001129.html

Version 1.3.2.41 introduced this bug that Bruno found:

You can demonstrate it by pasting a UTF-8 en-dash character into a text component: ‘something – like – this’.

The content of the text component then vanishes from the page when you save it.

Reverting your commit from Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:35:08 +0100 (BST) fixes the problem. Tested on perl-5.8.5.

The error that this puts in the log is:

== Cannot decode string with wide characters at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/Encode.pm line 166.
== at /usr/local/mkdoc-1-6/flo/Component.pm line 660.

Encode bug

MKDoc does not work correctly distros with Perl 5.8.8 and Encode v2.18 — these cause errors as documented on the Fedora Core 5 page, this problems doesn't happen with older versions of Perl, see the Fedora Core 4 page for an attempt to generate the same error.

The latest version of Encode to work with MKDoc is 2.09: http://www.dan.co.jp/~dankogai/cpan/Encode-2.09.tar.gz

Workaround

Install Encode 0.09, a RPM for FC5 has been built:

http://rpms.mkdoc.com/pub/apt/fedora/linux/5/i386/RPMS.mkdoc/perl-Encode-2.09- 8.i386.rpm

Install it like this:

rpm -Uvh --force perl-Encode-2.09-8.i386.rpm

Description

This is how Sam has described the problem:

It's a bug in the Encode module, which is a core Perl module used to do utf-8 encoding and decoding. Here's the behavior that MKDoc is relying on:

  $ perl -MEncode -MData::Dumper -e 'my $ref = Encode::decode_utf8({ foo =>
  1}); print Dumper($ref);'
  $VAR1 = {
'foo' => 1
};

That shows that Encode::decode_utf8 is passing a reference to a hash through un-mangled. That's what I get on my laptop, running Perl 5.8.6. However, here's what's happening on the machine that exhibits this problem:

$ perl -MEncode -MData::Dumper -e 'my $ref = Encode::decode_utf8({ foo =>
1}); print Dumper($ref);'
$VAR1 = 'HASH(0x9710c28)';

Now Encode::decode_utf8 is turning a hash into a stringified reference, causing the bug in MKDoc. That's Perl 5.8.8.

Sam has raised this at perlmonks see: http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=556003 and in the perl.unicode usenet group: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.unicode/3009 | http://groups.google.com/group/perl.unicode/browse_thread/thread/623802a9a29ca 220

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This document was last modified by Chris Croome on 2006-07-05 07:22:14
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