perl works, perlapped exe doesn't

Question

In a nutshell, I'm trying to use some modules, and they don't work, no warnings, errors, runtime errors, crashes, nothing, just no results. Specifically, I have

use strict;
use warnings;
use Lingua::Identify qw(:language_identification);

...

foreach my $f ( @txt ){
    my $s = &fileasstring( $f );
    my @l = langof( $s );           #  problem's here!
    &error( "!\nl=".scalar(@l)."\n" );
    foreach( @l ){ &error( "!$f\t[$_]\n" ); }
    &error( "\n" );
    }

and the output from running 'perl langs.pl' is

[da.txt]  reading file
[da.txt]    8 lines read
[da.txt]  done

da.txt  [Artikel 26. Enhver har ret til undervisning.  ...  som vedkommende har skabt.  ]

l=42
da.txt  [da]
da.txt  [0.278009331769791]
da.txt  [sv]
da.txt  [0.126520770367313]
da.txt  [nl]
da.txt  [0.0886509276813543]
...

and when running 'langs.exe' which seemingly perlapped just fine, I get

[da.txt]  reading file
[da.txt]    8 lines read
[da.txt]  done

da.txt  [Artikel 26. Enhver har ret til undervisning.  ...  som vedkommende har skabt.  ]

l=0

and that's it, no returned values from langof(), just an empty array.

The debugging info above shows that the file was read correctly (one each for da, de, en, es, fr, and several other languages), so it at least goes through the motions, but apparently perlapp finds modules well enough not to throw errors or warnings when compiling or at runtime, yet when compiled it, that routine within Identify just returns nothing.

Answer 1

I am not 100% certain of what is wrong here but I would check the following things:

• Check that $s does in fact contain some text (just add a print statement)
• PerlApp handling of utf-8 and module loading, perl packers usually require much more thorough reading of the documentation than they let on.
• Check what languages Lingua::Identify actually has loaded before running the identify loop, never assume anything!

As a last resort, try using PAR::Packer to "compile" your program.

Also, why are you calling fileasstring() with the & convention?