On 5/23/07, Tels <nospam-abuse@[...].com>  wrote:
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>  Moin,
> 
>  On Wednesday 23 May 2007 15:53:14 demerphq wrote:
>  > Hi Dan,
>  >
>  > I was wondering if there is some way to get Encode to emit the little
>  > endian version of UTF-16 (with BOM) as a typical Win32 on Intel app
>  > would do. It seems to me that currently
>  >
>  > my $octets= encode('UTF-16',$string);
>  >
>  > will only emit the big-endian form of it.
> 
>  As far as I gleaned from working with UTF, this is right. (or in other
>  words, UTF-16BE is just an alias for UTF-16), but I could be wrong.

No, thats not correct. UTF-16 files can be either big endian or little
endian and must start with a Byte Order Mark, codepoint U+FEFF, which
is used to determine what their endianness is. UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE
are encodings with a specific endianess and do not start with a BOM.

>  > Of course well behaved apps shouldnt care, but some do, also i know I
>  > can hand emit the BOM myself like so:
>  >
>  > my $octets= encode('UTF-16LE',chr(0xFEFF).$string);
>  >
>  > but this strck me as a bit convoluted and makes it a bit tricky to do
>  > with IO layers. If there isnt a way to do it currently maybe the name
>  > 'UTF-16:le' or something similar could be used for this?
> 
>  I am not sure I understand your question, since you showed it is possible to
>  get UTF-16LE, so what exactly do you want more? :)
> 
>  Shouldn't then:
> 
>          binmode ($FILE, 'UTF-16LE') or die("$!");
> 
>  just work?

Yes it works, but it doesnt ensure the file starts with a BOM. Which
is easily enough done by hand, but as i said above is a touch
annoying. I can imagine scenarios where its not clear whose
responsibility it is to add the BOM. I actually was trying to write a
utf-8 to utf-16 converter (long story) but the files are different
from that provided by most win32 tools i used for comparision as they
emit the little-endian variant instead.

Also it struck me as weird that UTF-16 in perl is alway big endian
even on a little endian architecture. Obviously its easier to test
this way.

Imo it would be cool to have a way to control it in code without hand
adding the BOM.

Ill do a patch if there isnt already a way to do it, i just wanted to
be sure before i look into it, and since Dan knows the code what could
take me a while to do would probably be the work of a few minutes for
him so i figured id see what he had to say first.

cheers,
yves

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