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

You can't use Unicode with printf if you have code points that take 0 or 2 print columns instead of 1, which it appears you do.

You need to use Unicode::GCString instead.

Wrong way:

printf "%-10.10s", our $string;

Right way:

use Unicode::GCString;

my $gcstring = Unicode::GCString->new(our $string);
my $colwidth = $gcstring->columns();
if ($colwidth > 10) {
    print $gcstring->substr(0,10);
} else {
    print " " x (10 - $colwidth);
    print $gcstring;
}

Answer 2

    #!/usr/bin/env perl

    use warnings;
    use strict;

    use utf8; # This is to allow utf8 in this program file (as opposed to reading/writing from/to file handles)

    binmode( STDOUT, 'utf8:' ); # Allow output of UTF8 to STDOUT

    my @strings = ( 'Mühßig', 'Holler' ); # UTF8 in this file, works because of 'use utf8'

    foreach my $s (@strings) { printf( "%-15s %10s\n", $s, 'lined up' ); } # should line up nicely

    open( FILE, 'utf8file' ) || die("Failed to open file: $! $?");

    binmode( FILE, 'utf8:' );

    # Same as above, but on the file instead of STDIN

    while(<FILE>) { chomp;printf( "%-15s %10s\n", $_, 'lined up' ); }

    close( FILE );

    # This works too
    use Encode;

    open( FILE, 'utf8file' ) || die("Failed to open file: $! $?");

    while(<FILE>) {
            chomp;
            $_ = decode_utf8( $_ );
            printf( "%-15s %10s\n", $_, 'lined up' );
    }

    close( FILE );

Answer 3

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.