perl problems

[Ken Gillett]

I've been running RH 8 on my server for some time and regularly ran a 
fairly complex perl script that parsed an XML file and contained the 
following line:-

	last if /^\t{0,2}<$tag>$/;

which would exit the loop at the end of that 'section' as $tag in fact 
contained "/dict". On upgrading to RH 9 this all fell apart and I spent 
the best part of a day trying to find out why and where it was failing. 
Strangely, it WOULD work if I replaced $tag with the literal string it 
contained (i.e. /dict) or when it found the line beginning with a 
single tab (i.e. way further down the file), but would NEVER recognise 
2 tabs and using $tag.

  On investigation I discovered that the above works perfectly with RH 
8's Perl 5.6.0.55 (and my Mac's 5.8.1), but NOT with RH 9's 5.6.0.88. I 
upgraded to 5.8.5 and all's well again:-)

Is this a known problem with that version of Perl or as usual am I the 
first to discover a bug in such a widely used piece of software?



Ken  G i l l e t t

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