Unicode help

[geniuskanwal]

Before I begin to explain my problem, I just want to say that I can do the following two things:

1. Using Perl, connect to a MS Access Databse Table and perform the required operations.(Database is in English language)
2. I can read and write UTF8 text files using Perl.

The following code explains how do I write UTF8 files.:

$infile="out2.txt";
#$outfile="out.txt";
#open (FH,">:utf8",$outfile);
 
open(F,"<:utf8",$infile);
 
while(<F>){
chomp;
 
binmode(STDOUT,":utf8");
 
print "$_"."\n";
 
}
if($_ == /\x{0932}/)
{
 
print "L"; 
}
$strvar="\x{0932} \x{0917}";
print $strvar."done"."\n";
#print FH $strvar."\n";
close(F);

Here, I am reading from one UTF8 file and writing to another UTF8 file. Also, in the new UTF8 file I am adding two more characters whose hex values are there in the variable "strvar" as can be seen in the program. Now when I see this file in Wordpard or Notepad everything is fine.

Now I come to my question.
I have enabled Hindi Language/Internationalization support on my machine. If I directly try to write Hindi to the tables in MS Access, I am able to do that. Now the problem is that when I try to insert a string into MS Access from Perl whose Hex value(Unicode) is \x{0932} it does not appear correctly in the table. The Character that should appear corresponding to 0932 Hex is shown below(You can see this if you have Unicode support on your machine).
ल

However, instead of the above character, some garbled character is displayed on the screen. I dnt know how to insert unicode characters into MS Access from Perl(That is issuing a insert query from Perl to insert unicode strings). I need urgent help on this. I would really appreciate if someone could help me out.

thanks in advance.

Kanwaljeet

[eWish]

Welcome to TSDN!

When you insert the data are you using placeholders? Are you expecting to see the hexadecimal representation in the db or the actual character after the insert?

--Kevin

[bvhoyweg]

Can I hijack this thread? I'm having exactly the same problem.

Yes, I'm using placeholders to insert data in MSAccess. From in MSAccess I see the UTF8 characters as two separate characters.

When I'm doing a select from Perl, I do get the characters in UTF8 format back (when printing to a file).

So it seems perl treats characters as 8 bit objects, splitting up UTF8 characters in 2 (or more) pieces. Because in MSAccess each 8bit part of the UTF8 character is visible as a separate character

I'm using activestate Perl 5.10 with DBD::ADO

Bart