Really can't say. Maybe a character encoding problem if you're copy-and-pasting. The following code works here:

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;
my $db = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:host=localhost');
my ($encoded) = $db->selectrow_array("SELECT ENCODE('ToBeHidden', 'sec
+retvalue')");
my ($decoded) = $db->selectrow_array("SELECT DECODE('$encoded', 'secre
+tvalue')");
print $decoded;   # prints --> ToBeHidden

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In reply to Re^5: Perl script to decode SQL ENCODE function by Loops
in thread Perl script to decode MySQL ENCODE() function by Martin90

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