Hi monks,

I come seeking a means of preserving diacritical marks in a string. The situation is that I am using LWP to access a website and copy certain parts of it into various strings. It's all bibliographic information for various books. The titles sometimes contain diacritical marks, ranging from your run of the mull umlaut and accent grave to your more bizarre Russian characters that I don't know the names of.

I'm not looking for a way of stripping the diacritics out. In fact, that's the problem. When I copy the text into the string, it copies as basic ASCII. I need it preserved as-is, because I'm turning it right around and searching a database with it, and that database expects it to still have the diacritics, and finds no results if it doesn't.

I'm not too familiar with encoding schemes, so I'm not really sure what I should be looking for in terms of modules and approaches. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.





UPDATE: Here's a link to the page I'm working with:

The page I am working with

Upon closer inspection, I realized it is not actually converting the characters to basic ASCII. It is just removing them entirely. So "Das europäische Volksmärchen" becomes "Das europische Volksmrchen", which is why the searches weren't working. It turns out the database doesn't actually care about the accent marks, but I do kinda still need the letters.

The weird thing is that according to the source for the page, it's UTF-8 and there is no encoding on the characters themselves (i.e., no &xxxx codes), but I thought UTF-8 could be converted back to basic ASCII as needed? Is this something I need to actually implement in the code to make happen?

The code that fetches the page with the title on it is the following: 

$HTML = HTTP::Request->new( GET => $MARC_page );
$HTML = $user_agent->request($HTML);
$HTML = $HTML->content;

[download]

So $MARC_page is the actual link (provided above) to the page I need, LWP fetches it and after a couple steps passes all of the content into the $HTML scalar. The code that fetches the title from $HTML is the following: 

if ($HTML =~ m{
        245\d{0,2}  # MARC code 245 followed by 0-2 indicators
        .*?         # followed by anything, ungreedy
        \|a\s       # followed by a pipe and the subfield
        (.*?)       # followed by the title, 
                        # which can be anything, ungreedy
        (?:\||<)    # followed by a pipe and the next subfield
                        # or, if no subfield, an opening HTML tag brac
+ket
    }xmgs) {
        $title = MARC::Field->new('245','','', 'a' => "$1");
    }
    else {
            $title = MARC::Field->new('245','','', 'a' => "field does 
+not exist");
    }

[download]

I'm sure that didn't format nearly as well as I'd've liked, but hopefully it's still readable.

I'm using Perl 5.8.9. Sorry for not providing more info earlier, like I said, I wasn't even sure what info would be needed. Hopefully this will be more helpful. Thanks for any assistance.



UPDATE 2: Okay so the link I gave above doesn't work because that record has actually been deleted as part of routine maintenance. It's irrelevant to this, so don't worry about that. Here's a link to the same info that should still work:

I am hoping this one works, Melvyl has the most god awful URLs to work with that I've ever seen.

In reply to keeping diacritical marks in a string by Foxpond Hollow

Title:
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