Wide character
Updated: 10/17/2017 by Computer Hope
A wide character describes a character with a value greater than 127, 255, or that occupies more than one byte, depending on the computer or programming language.
In the Perl programming language, if a character has a value greater than 255 with no encoding layer specified, the following error is recorded in the HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) error log.
example.cgi: Wide character in print at example.cgi line 1077
This error occurs because Perl is trying to fit things in ISO-8859-1 for backward compatibility reason, but can't and uses UTF-8 encoding instead. To fix this error, specify the encoding using the line below at the top of your Perl script.
binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)"; #Set encoding