On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 09:18:00AM -0500, Anne L. Highsmith wrote: > Here's my main question -- is that the principal > concern/question/problem, i.e. that directory lengths will not be > computed correctly using the existing MARC::Record module with a > Unicode record? Or is it only in certain situations that the directory > length would not be computed correctly?
Yes, but only if the record actually contains unicode :) If you are looking for an example of how MARC::Record breaks when there is utf8 in the record you can look at t/utf8.t which is a test distributed with the MARC-Record package. Currently, this test is skipped because otherwise it would fail. > If anyone is inspired to make the necessary updates to the MARC::Record > module to handle unicode records, I'd certainly be happy to test. I'd also be > eternally grateful, since my alternative might be re-writing 8 or 10 job > streams in the next 10 weeks so that I can: 1) export the records from my > database in MARC8; 2) edit them; 3) reload them doing a MARC8-Unicode > conversion utility provided by the lms vendor. I've been meaning to write to the list about this for sometime now. How would people feel about the next version of MARC-Record (perhaps a v2.0) which handled utf8 properly and required a modern perl? By modern perl I mean a version >= 5.8.1. The reason why 5.8.1 is required is that it's the first perl with a byte oriented substr() (available via the bytes pragma). Perhaps if people could respond to the list (or me if you prefer) with the version of Perl that you use MARC::Record with I could keep tallies and report back to the list. //Ed
