Tag: CGI

Perl CGI.pm and Unicode

zac

Because I always forget how to handle Unicode input/output in Perl .. a few notes to help jog my memory for next time:

Remember to use both CGI.pm and Encode.pm:

use CGI qw(:standard);
use Encode qw(decode encode);

Handle webform input with Unicode characters:

my $input = decode('utf8', param('input'));

Prepare scalar variables to cope with Unicode characters:

my $output = encode('utf8', $input);

Declare the correct Content-Type when creating HTML:

print header(-type => 'text/html', -charset => 'utf-8');
print start_html(-title => 'Page with Unicode', -encoding => 'utf-8');

Now you can print your Unicode variables without error:

print div({-id => 'output'}, $output);