So I'm parsing some HTML with HTML::TreeBuilder, my new favourite module: 
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($page);
$tree->elementify();

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at which point it dies, saying "Parsing of undecoded UTF-8 will give garbage when decoding entities at /Library/Perl/HTML/TreeBuilder.pm line 96.".

Now my first problem is that line 96 is the rather unedifying "$new->parse($whunk);". So, after a certain amount of trial and error I track that down to one of the dependent modules, HTML::Parser, which tells me that "The solution is to use the Encode::encode_utf8() on the data before feeding it to the $p->parse()".

So I do this: 

$page = Encode::encode_utf8($page);
my $tree = HTML::TreeBuilder->new_from_content($page);
$tree->elementify();

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But it doesn't seem to make any difference. Same error.

So I guess I have three questions:

  1. What's the best way to track down error messages like that? I was completely mystified and there were a lot of other modules involved.
  2. What should I be doing to ensure the Parser won't choke on this particular HTML?
  3. In the more general case, where some HTML will be UTF-8 and some won't, how do I code? I can't utf-encode all HTML, just in case it's UTF-8, but Parser chokes as soon as it finds the HTML is UTF-8, so how do I create an if-clause which figures that out ahead of time?

($_='kkvvttuu bbooppuuiiffss qqffssmm iibbddllffss')
=~y~b-v~a-z~s; print

In reply to HTML::Tree problems with UTF-8 Content. by Cody Pendant

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