First, you want eq, not ==. eq is used for string comparisons, == is used for numeric comparisons.

Second, strictly speaking, you aren't removing characters for JPY and GBP. You're replacing the character with a space. Do you intend to do that, or do you intend to remove it?

Third, you probably want to put the characters in brackets ([]):

  s/[â¬]//g;
[download]

Next, move the close(PDF); to after the print <PDF>. You can't read from a closed filehandle.

Maybe what you really want is:

  open my $pdf, "<", "LeasevsBuy.pdf" or handleError($!); # you probab
+ly want to print out an error page instead of just dying.
  binmode $pdf;
  $output = do { local $/; <$pdf> };
  close $pdf;

  print "Content-Type: application/pdf\n";
  print "Content-Length: " .length($output) . "\n\n";
  print $output;
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Hope that helps.

thanks for the explination it makes sense, I am sure I am missing something important here, but even when using your updated version for the second part all i get is encrypted gumble, instead of the file opening in the browser, what am I doing wrong?

As for your second question,

• You close PDF before you read from it.
• You binmode when you read, but you don't when you write.
• print while <PDF>; would use less memory.
• What's $output?
• It's better to use the 3-arg open over the 2-arg open to open files.

my $file_name = "LeasevsBuy.pdf";
open(PDF, '<', $file_name)
   or die "could not open PDF \"$file_name\": $!\n";
binmode PDF;

my $size = -s $file_name;

print "Content-Type: application/pdf\n";
print "Content-Length: $size\n\n";
binmode(STDOUT);
$/ = \4096;  # Read 4k at at time.
print while <PDF>;

close(PDF);  # Optional.
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Update: Overlooked that $output was used without being set. Fixed.

• @_ =~ s/.../.../g;
  should be
  $_ =~ s/.../.../g;
  or just
  s/.../.../g;

  $_ is aliased to the current member of @_ by the foreach loop.

• ==string
  should be
  eqstring
  See perlop for the difference.

checkCurrency($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2);

sub checkCurrency{
    for (@_) {
        if ($currency eq "Euro (EUR)") {
            s/€//g;
        }elsif ($currency eq "Japan, Yen(JPY)") {
            s/Â/ /g;
        }elsif ($currency eq "United Kingdom, Pound(GBP)") {
            s/Â/ /g;
        }
    }
}
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Of course, the real problem is that you're not using Encode's decode to translate UTF-8 bytes into characters, and later Encode's encode to translate the characters into the proper encoding (or Encode's from_to to do it in one step).

I have been trying to looking into the Encode, but was never sucessful, it would not print anything when I tried, since i have to get this working today, I didn't have alot of time to figure it out I spent a few hours on it but still couldn't wrap my mind around it.

Say you want to convert from UTF-8 to iso-latin-1,

use Encode qw( decode encode );

... input ...

foreach ($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2) {
    $_ = decode('UTF-8', $_);
}

... do some work ...

foreach ($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2) {
    $_ = encode('iso-latin-1', $_);
}

... output ...
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If you just want to translate,

use Encode qw( from_to );

... input ...

foreach ($hardwareValue1, $hardwareValue2) {
    $_ = from_to($_, 'UTF-8', 'iso-latin-1');
}

... output ...
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If a given char doesn't exist in iso-latin-1, you'll get a ? instead.

Remember, when you read in something, it is encoded. Convert it to characters before working on it. When you need to write something, it needs to be encoded.