FIX_LATIN(1p)

💖 FIX_LATIN ✨

okay bestie, so <rainbow>fix_latin</rainbow> is this lil filter script (it lives in the perl manual pages, section 1p) that takes a data stream which is mostly utf8 and fixes any latin — aka non-ASCII 8-bit — characters that are lurking in there. it's giving cleanup crew energy fr fr. 🧹💅

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

fix_latin options <input_file >output_file

Options:

 --use-xs <value> 'auto' | 'always' | 'never'
 --version        list version number
 --help           detailed help message

like, you feed it stdin, you get stdout, the options are just vibes on top. 🎀

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

the script is a filter. you hand it source data that might be a whole chaotic mix of ASCII, UTF8, ISO8859-1 and CP1252 characters — no judgment, we've all been there — and what comes out the other side is all ASCII/UTF8. glow-up complete. 👑

here's the tea on how each byte gets treated:

• Multi-byte UTF8 characters get passed through untouched ✨ (with one tiny caveat: over-long UTF8 byte sequences get converted to the shortest normal form — so they get tidied up, not left messy).
• Single byte characters get converted like this:

0x00 - 0x7F   ASCII - passed through unchanged
0x80 - 0x9F   Converted to UTF8 using CP1252 mappings
0xA0 - 0xFF   Converted to UTF8 using Latin-1 mappings

bestie note: that 0x80–0x9F zone is where CP1252 lives, and 0xA0–0xFF is Latin-1 territory. the script knows which is which, you don't have to. 🫶

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• --use-xs 'auto' | 'always' | 'never' — this overrides the default <purple>'auto'</purple> behaviour, which is: try to use the XS module, and if it's not there, gracefully fall back to the pure-Perl version. set it to 'never' and you'll always use the Perl version. set it to 'always' and you'll always use XS — and die if it's not available. no fallback, no mercy, periodt. 💀
• --version (alias -v) — prints the version number of the underlying Encoding::FixLatin and XS modules. receipts, basically. 🧾
• --help (alias -?) — shows you this documentation. hi, you're reading it. 🙈

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🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

fun fact: this script was originally written to help convert a Postgres database from SQL-ASCII encoding to UNICODE UTF8 encoding. iconic origin story honestly. the examples below show it doing exactly that.

if you've got a SQL format dump file that you'd normally restore by piping straight into psql, you can just run the dump file through this script first:

fix_latin < dump_file | psql -d database

if your dump file is compressed and you'd normally restore it with pg_restore, you can drop the -d option on pg_restore and pipe the resulting SQL through this script and into psql:

pg_restore -O dump_file | fix_latin | psql -d database

and if you just wanna snoop at the non-ASCII lines in a dump file, this one's for you:

perl -ne '/^COPY (\S+)/ and $t = $1; print "$t:$_" if /[^\x00-\x7F]/' dump_file

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

this script is implemented using the Encoding::FixLatin Perl module. for more deets, read the module documentation with:

perldoc Encoding::FixLatin

and specifically, bestie, go read the 'LIMITATIONS' section, because that's where it explains the circumstances under which data corruption might occur. like — read it. fr fr. don't skip it. 😭

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👑 COPYRIGHT & LICENSE 👑

Copyright 2009-2014 Grant McLean "<grantm@cpan.org>"

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

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and that's a wrap!! 💖 this page came to you from the user contributed perl documentation, version perl v5.40.1, dated 2025-08-04 — tysm for reading, go fix some latin, slay. 🎀✨🦋