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bart (450)

bart
  bart.lateur@pandora.be

Journal of bart (450)

Tuesday March 04, 2008
03:13 PM

CPAN.pm weirdness

[ #35835 ]

The latest official release of CPAN.pm, version 1.9205, contains a null byte in its source file.

I am somewhat surprised that perl doesn't trip over it, as there have been far more innocuous things that have made it stumble in the past, like line endings of another platform (Mac/Unix).

In case you're wondering: it's in sub CPAN::Shell::recent, at the start of the line with contents (that appear in the source only once):

$desc =~ s/.+? - //;

p.s. It still is there in the latest developer release (1.92_57).


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  • NUL bytes are perfectly legal inside Perl programs. The core uses them in a couple of places when creating code snippets to pass back to the interpreter, particularly as the quote character for q, as it's the only character that a C string can't contain. (Search for the string %c%s%c in perl.c [activestate.com])

  • This may surprise you, but your use.perl journal is not the CPAN.pm bug tracker. Andreas is unlikely to ever see this. It is here [cpan.org] or you can send mail [mailto].

    Report early, report often.

    • It makes a great place to discuss things, though, and find out if they are really bugs or not.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • Exactly. I'm posting here to see:
        • to see if I can state my case, and
        • to check if I even have a case.
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