When downloading chess games with international players I have to decode utf8 coded names. This works as far as the names include only simple acute, umlaut etc. characters. In this case both "utf8::decode($what);" and "$what=Encode::decode('utf8',$what);" do the job. On the other hand especially with russian players where the name includes cyrillic characters the names seem to be coded in a more complicated way. In the latter case utf8 decoding results in a string which seems to be utf8 coded itself. This gave me the idea to apply decoding twice. However this only works with "utf8::decode($what);utf8::decode($what);" (and the result is what I expect - a readable string) but fails with "$what=Encode::decode('utf8',$what);$what=Encode::decode('utf8',$what);" (it reports an error for the second time - string not being an utf8 string).

My questions: how do I know that I have to apply decoding more than once and why different utf8 decoders behave differently in perl?

In reply to Utf8 experts help! by chessgui

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