Dealing with data that comes from webpages can be really complicated. There is likely to be a combination of ASCII, UTF-8, and wide characters in the data returned.

ASCII is valid UTF-8 so you cannot have a combination of UTF-8 and ASCII in a string. You just have UTF-8. Wide-characters is ambiguous here. It seems to mean broken/unknown bytes that are putative character data. This doesn't happen much in the wild anymore. When it does you see pages littered with �s. So, I don't think that this situation is "likely." I can't think of the last time I saw it.

This "Hello\x{26c4}".encode("utf-8","\x{26f0}")."\x{10102}\x{2fa1b}" is broken on purpose (concatted perl UTF-8, binary UTF-8, and perl UTF-8). This can only happen through incorrect handling of character data encodings which, I assert, is fairly uncommon on the web today.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding. Can you give a live example of a site that your tool is meant to fix.

Update: s/ASII/ASCII/;

In reply to Re: Safe string handling by Your Mother
in thread Safe string handling by tdlewis77

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