I tried both ways but i got this error in both cases as well: 
Software error:

Cannot decode string with wide characters at C:/Perl/lib/Encode.pm lin
+e 182.

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You should show, for both cases the contents of line 182 of your script. As it is, I can only guess that you did not actually follow my suggestions, because only one of the two approaches uses the Encode::decode function, so only that one case would issue this particular error message. If the "decode()" call was being used in both cases, then you didn't understand my second suggestion, and you probably didn't do it right.

In any case, at this point, I've lost track of what problem you are actually having. The form returns a utf8 string value for the "select" param, and this value comes from the "@display_files" array, which you use both to create the menu and to test the return value of the "select" param. The array contains file names that are read from your directory as iso-8859-7 strings, and you convert them to utf8 before putting them into the popup menu, and you are confident that the strings being returned by the form are being correctly handled as utf8 string. And despite all this being true, your testing of the "param('select')" value never succeeds?

Try an experiment. Reduce the process to just the bare minimum, where your cgi script dummies up a list of Greek "name" strings, puts up a form with a popup menu, and checks the param value that comes in when the form is submitted. With the process reduced to just this activity, you can focus more carefully on a variety of diagnostics, if/when it fails. If you can't figure out a diagnostic that reveals the problem, the test script should be small enough to post here in its entirety, and it would be "self-contained" (runnable anywhere), so others can try it out and help find the problem.

If it doesn't fail, then the task is to figure out what the difference is between this simple test script, and the logic you used in the larger application.

One last thing to check about the encoding issue. Suppose the client browser's form submission includes a value for the "select" paramater that is four bytes long, and those four bytes (expressed in hex) are: 

  ce  a6  ce  a5

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That would be the utf8 byte stream for a two-character string containing the letters "PHI" and "UPSILON". Let's suppose further that there actually was a file with this name in your directory, and @display_files contains this very same 2-character utf8 string. There's a chance that something in the handling of the input parameter string is doing an improper conversion of the original 4-byte sequence into a perl-internal utf8 string. The result of this improper conversion might be an 8-byte string, consisting of: 
  c3  8e  c2  a6  c3  8e  c2  a5

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That's what you get if the original four-byte string is assumed to be non-utf8 (e.g. iso-8859-1) and is then "converted" to utf8 based on that false assumption. You would be able to check this with a suitable test script where the strings for the menu all the same length. If the string coming back from the form is twice as long, it's a problem with interpreting the form data correctly as utf8 characters.

In reply to Re^5: somethign wrong with the sumbit by graff
in thread somethign wrong with the sumbit by Nik

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