in reply to special characters in parsed json rendering badly in browser

Thank you all for your suggestions but I don't feel I'm any closer with this problem, partly my own fault for not being clear what I want. (Which i'm figuring out as I puzzle it out.) I'd like the text/data to be portable to other applications that can read HTML.

I did figure out (thanks poj) that I can set the encoding in the HTML page to have it display correctly in the browser. But if that text gets posted to another page or app I don't necessarily have control over its page encoding.

SO what I really want is to HTML encode those characters. But when I try HTML::Encode: for, say, the smart apostrophe:

use HTML::Entities;
my($text) = "Kren’s 89th birthday";
print encode_entities($text), $/;

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that one character gets converted to three HTML entities:

Kren’s 89th birthday

[download]

which displays a lot of garbage in the browser.

So I'm lost as to what's going on or how to resolve it. Perl is rendering the JSON string as a smart quote but HTML::Encode is improperly encoding it.

So far my best solution seems to be:

$event{'desc'} =~ s/’/\&\#39\;/g;
$event{'desc'} =~ s/–/-/g;
$event{'desc'} =~ s/—/ - /g;
$event{'desc'} =~ s/‘/'/g;
$event{'desc'} =~ s/'/'/g;
$event{'desc'} =~ s/“/"/g;
$event{'desc'} =~ s/”/"/g;

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but of course that only handles characters I'm aware of.

Thoughts? Thanks for your patience.

Scott

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Re^2: special characters in parsed json rendering badly in browser
by poj (Abbot) on Sep 09, 2018 at 15:02 UTC

    see utf8 - The use utf8 pragma tells the Perl parser to allow UTF-8 in the program text in the current lexical scope.

    use utf8;
use HTML::Entities;
my($text) = "Kren’s 89th birthday";
print encode_entities($text), $/;
# result right single quote
# Kren’s 89th birthday

    [download]
    poj
[reply]
[d/l]

      That's it! That's all I needed, thank you!

[reply]

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