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), $/;

[download]

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;

[download]

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

Thoughts? Thanks for your patience.

Scott

In reply to Re: special characters in parsed json rendering badly in browser by slugger415
in thread special characters in parsed json rendering badly in browser by slugger415

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