On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Frank Smith wrote:
> I am trying to use the £ (pound sterling) symbol in a script that
> produces both TEXT and HTML the html handles the Unicode fine, all the
> browsers seem to work. However, once the text file arrives on the Windowz
> box the Unicode £ screws Excel.
> Can you help by suggesting a way to force a specific script to produce
> 'plain text' (That bit more than ASCII) or preferably to specifically
> output, via the IO layer, 'plain text' on specific occasions.
Well, there's nothing that prevents you from using UTF-8 for *plain
text*. I've got tens of thousands of UTF-8 plain text files and am
making one now (because I'm gonna send this email in 'text/plain;
charset=UTF-8')
Anyway, what you want is to get your output in Windows-1252
(or its subset ISO-8859-1) so that Excel running under English version
of Windows 9x/ME or Windows 2k/XP with the default locale set to English
can read your text output with £. The man page of 'Encode' should help
you (see the section Encoding via PerlIO).
Alternatively, if you're on Win2k/XP (and don't care about Win9x/ME),
you can prepend your UTF-8 plain text output with UTF-8 BOM (that is, at
the very beginning of your plain text output file, print out "\x{feff}").
With UTF-8 BOM present, Win2k/XP should be able to detect that your
plain text file is in UTF-8 instead of legacy 'code pages'.
Jungshik
