Hi

I run CGI::Application::Plugin::TT under mod_perl and need to send either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 encoded xml (generated by templates) back to the client.

I have asked about this before but it seems that changing the encoding of STDOUT via binmode does not work under mod_perl.

I have now found a solution that works for me, but it is not entirely clear to me..

What I do is let TT generate the xml in utf8 and then change the encoding in a cgiapp_postrun method like this: 

use Encode;

sub cgiapp_postrun {
  my($this, $response_ref)=@_;

  my $encoding = ... #figure out which encoding to use

  if($encoding ne "UTF-8") {
       my $response_utf8 = decode('UTF-8', $$response_ref);
       $$response_ref = encode('ISO-8859-1', $response_utf8);
  }

[download]
This works but what I don't understand is why it is neccessary to first call decode (it does not work without it).

I always thought that by default a Perl-string would be utf8, so I had assumed that I can call encode straight away, but this evidently is wrong...

So can someone please explain what is going on?

Many thanks!

In reply to decode/encode - can someone explain this please by morgon

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