If you're using HTML::Template and need to cope with the unclean half of ISO-8859-1,
the standard procedure is to forego "ESCAPE=HTML" and encode the parameter values yourself,
probably using HTML::Entities. But retrofitting a big application to do this can really suck. (Our app has over a hundred templates.)
So rather than going down a road that sucked,
I modified HTML::Template 2.7 to support an "encode_entities" option.
When true, it runs strings through HTML::Entities::encode_entities rather
than HTML::Template's limited built-in encoder. This let us get most of the way
to ISO-8859-1 support with a one-line change to our webapp:
my $template = HTML::Template->new(
filename => $template,
cache => 1,
global_vars => 1,
+ encode_entities => 1,
);
The patch (with supporting unit tests) is
here.
I've proposed the patch on the html-template-users mailing list.
If you're on the list and think it's a good idea, please add your support.
Or if you think the idea sucks, say so. But if you think we should switch
to TT, come see us 3 years ago. :)