How does Storable and serialization interact with Unicode and encodings?

When using Perl's Storable module for serialization, it's essential to understand how it interacts with Unicode and different encodings. The Storable module allows you to store Perl data structures in a binary format, but proper handling of Unicode strings is crucial for maintaining data integrity.

The key considerations when using Storable with Unicode are:

  • Ensure that strings are properly encoded as UTF-8 before serialization.
  • Handle any Unicode characters correctly to avoid data loss during the serialization and deserialization processes.

Here's an example demonstrating the serialization of a Unicode string using Storable:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Storable qw(store retrieve); use Encode qw(encode decode); # Example Unicode string my $unicode_string = "Hello, 世界!"; # "World" in Chinese # Encode the string to UTF-8 my $utf8_string = encode("UTF-8", $unicode_string); # Serialize (store) the encoded string store \$utf8_string, 'datafile'; # Retrieve and decode the string my $retrieved = retrieve('datafile'); my $decoded_string = decode("UTF-8", $$retrieved); print "$decoded_string\n"; # Output: Hello, 世界!

Perl Storable serialization Unicode UTF-8 encoding data structures