How can I properly align UTF-8 strings with Perl's printf?

Question

what is the right way to get here a beautiful output ( all lines the same indent )?

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use DBI;

my $phone_book =          


        

Answer 1

I haven't been able to reproduce it, but loosely speaking what seems to be happening is that it's a character encoding mismatch. Most likely your Perl source file has been saved in UTF-8 encoding. However you have not enabled use utf8; in the script. So it's interpreting each of the non-ASCII German characters as being two characters and setting the padding accordingly. But the terminal you're running on is also in UTF-8 mode so the characters print correctly. Try adding use warnings; and I'll bet you get a warning printed, and I would not be surprised if adding use utf8; actually fixes the problem.