Here's the situation:

I have an HTML form. When its contents are submitted to a perl script, any non-ASCII characters come out wrongly encoded, for instance if I type 'I like Beyoncé' it comes out in my script as 'I like Beyoncé'

The script does some other stuff, AJAX was involved at one point, but I have now reduced it to a simple (POST or GET) request to this script:

use CGI::Simple;
my $q = CGI::Simple->new();
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
print $q->param('text');
[download]

And if the 'text' parameter contains anything double-byte/UTF-8, I get that output.

Things I have tried:

• Making sure the page with the originating form is set to UTF-8 in the HTML
• Making sure the server which the form and the perl script live on sends the UTF-8 content-type by default (two restarts!)
• Changing the form to specify charset in this HTML attribute: accept-charset="UTF-8"
• Adding an explicit charset to CGI::Simple, see here
• EDITED TO ADD: adding binmode STDOUT, ":utf8"; to the CGI script

But still the problem persists. What else can I do?

Confusingly, this page: https://www.i18nqa.com/debug/utf8-debug.html seems to suggest my errant character, é turning into é is caused by Windows-1252 encoding, a.k.a. ISO 8859-1, but this is nothing to do with Windows. It's happening on OS X for a start.

TIA, fellow monks

SOLVED: This is what worked:

use Encode;
print Encode::decode_utf8($q->param('text'))
[download]

I guess I just have to accept that when the text leaves URL A it might be UTF-8 but there's no way to tell page B that, and I will always have to decode it.

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