POK Flag Weirdness wth binary files

[Wayne Myers]

Hi,

This week I got bitten by something very strange. I was writing
code that needed to decrypt something encrypted using Rijndael
encryption, but when I read the key in, for some reason, the
Crypt::Rijndael module refused to accept the key as a valid
scalar string.

Digging around in the Crypt::Rijndael code and testing the string
with Devel:eek revealed that no matter what method I used to
read the key (a stream of random binary digits), the internal POK
flag was not being set. Crypt::Rijndael explicitly tests the POK
flag before accepting a key: this is why that was failing.

However, I am not the first person to come across this problem,
and found an extremely strange workaround here:

http://groups.google.com/[email protected]&frame=off

I have written a short script reproducing the problem (under Perl
5.6.1 and Perl 5.8.3) and demonstrating the same workaround, here:

http://www.waz.easynet.co.uk/pok/pok.pl.txt

Is it a bug in Perl, a bug in Crypt::Rijndael, or a bug in my
understanding of how to read in binary files?

I'd be grateful if anyone could help me shed light on the matter

Cheers etc.,

Wayne

 

[! aaa]

Does the problem go away if you

use bytes;
no utf8;

???