I need to pull some info about an article out of a database and display it on a Web page, but ran into a problem with non-english text.

The text was taken from a utf-8 XML document and put into an Oracle database. I want to get it out of the database and then display it in an HTML page as iso-8859-1.

Addition (4/22): After reviewing the xml documents, I found that the xml document contains entities and not the special characters (as I had previously thought).

For example: 'Jos&\#233; El&\#237;as' 'José Elías' was parsed from the XML document and stored in the db as 'José Elía'. When I query and display the text it displays as 'José Elía'.

I want the text to display properly on the page, so I need to either convert it back to 'José Elía' or I could display it as 'Jos&\#233 El&\#237a'. What is the best way to accomplish this?

This is only a problem with the title and author, the rest of the page renders properly as iso-8859-1.

Here is what the script is currently doing:

...
print qq(
<span class='textTitles'>$article->{'title'}</span><br>
Publication Date: $article->{'pub_date'}<br>
Author: $article->{'author'}<br>
Price: @{[ PrintablePrice($format_list[0]) ]}<br>
);
...

[download]

UPDATE (4/22):

Thanks for all of the responses.

FYI - I am using perl 5.8.

Using encode, decode and Bart's solution did not produce the proper results--the data was unchanged.

I have a major complication... see the addition above. I don't even know what the title of this question should be now. How can I get back to the correct entity or special character?

In reply to converting utf-8 (entities?) to ISO-8859-1 by hoffj

Title:
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