Bug#665274: perl-base: $utf8string ~= /regex/ fails

[Bodo Eggert]

Package: perl-base
Version: 5.10.1-17squeeze3
Severity: important
Tags: upstream


Some versions of perl, including 5.10.1-17squeeze3, have problems matching utf-8 characters:

$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 perl -e 'use utf8; "Herbert Grönemeyer" =~ /(.*?)\s*\(with (.*)\)$/i'
Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0xb6, with no preceding start byte) in pattern match (m//) at -e line 1.
$ _

More info can be found at e.g. http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=843208

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.4
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (700, 'stable'), (450, 'oldstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages perl-base depends on:
ii  dpkg                          1.15.8.12  Debian package management system
ii  libc6                         2.11.3-2   Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib

perl-base recommends no packages.

Versions of packages perl-base suggests:
ii  perl                   5.10.1-17squeeze3 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 

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