Hello,

I am working on an application that may receive HTML and XML data in several encodings, notably ISO-88591-1 and UTF-8. In my test scripts I would like to encode the test data in different encodings, and by setting the appropriate HTTP headers, I want to make sure that my application won't choke on them.

I understand that Perl uses utf8 (lax UTF-8) and all my source code is encoded in UTF-8. I read the Encode perldoc and tried this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;

my $perl_str = "αινσϊρό";
print "IN UTF:$perl_str\n";
my $iso_str =  encode("iso-8859-1", $perl_str);
print "IN ISO:$iso_str\n";
my $utf_str = decode("iso-8859-1", $iso_str);
print "BACK IN UTF:$utf_str\n";

[download]


To my surprise the complete output was readable on my shell which should have printed funny characters for the LATIN1 prints (because my shell is configured for UTF-8). I am guessing that Perl translated back to utf8 automagically but would like to corroborate with more knowledgeable monks. Also, if anyone knows and could kindly point to a module that performs these types of tests, would really appreciate it.

Thanks beforehand,
Alejandro Imass

In reply to How to test different encoding by ait

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