Esteemed monks, I have a problem with encoding of an emoji in perl. The string "Test 😀" is read from a MySQL database table which has encoding latin1. Obviously that's not a UTF-8 character set, but my console seems smart enough to detect the intended output, as a plain "select * from table" on the "mysql" client displays the "grinning face" emoji correctly.

Then my perl (version 5.26) program logs the text to a log file, and again running "tail -f" on the log file displays the emoji in the text correctly. I also log the bytes using sprintf( "%vX", $text) and it prints "54.65.73.74.20.F0.9F.98.80". So the bytes for the emoji are there, in "F0.9F.98.80".

Then the text is JSON encoded (using the JSON library), and sent using $conn->send_utf8() to a websocket client using Net::WebSocket::Server, however the websocket client (running in a web browser) receives "Test 😀". I've tried encode( 'UTF-8', $text ) which did not fix the problem.

The whole subject of character encoding is not an easy one, and mixing MySQL with Perl with websockets (with JSON for good measure) has made it tricky to tell where the problem is.

Can anyone help find why the websocket client doesn't receive the emoji correctly please?

In reply to Encoding of emoji character by dcunningham

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