It's not clear to me from your example what data you have got and what you would like to convert. If I unserstand you right, you already have as input data:

1. The search link
2. The Japanese name of the game (任天堂), as a sequence of unicode code points (20219, 22825, 22530)
3. The English translation of this name (Nintendo)

I only have the Japanese (and thus, the Unicode and/or EUC-JP encoding). I don't have the English. I was just giving that one as an example. I will get() a page from the search link, but I can't pass it a JPN-friendly encoding (ironically).

I don't have the English

Beg your pardon???? Does this mean that, given a string of Kanji (the Japanese word of the game, 任天堂), you would like a transliteration into English alphabet?????????? In this case, you need a Kanji dictionary (and you also will have to decide which transliteration style you choose). Or did I misundertand you here completely?

-- 
Ronald Fischer <ynnor@mm.st>

http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-19-71-6-49-en-15-{your_string_here}-43-6
+.html
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And in order to plug that sort of string into that query template, you have to:

1. break the string into separate characters;
2. convert each character into its decimal numeric Unicode code point value
3. embed each numeric character value between "&#" and ";"
4. do the "uri encoding" that turns "&", "#" and ";" into "%26", "%23" and "%3B", respectively

So, where's the problem? Have you tried something like this?

my $url = http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-19-71-6-49-en-15-XXX-43-6.html

my $string = "...";  # wherever you get your Unicode Asian string from

$string =~ s/([^[:ascii:]])/"%26%23".ord($1)."%3B"/eg;

$url =~ s/XXX/$string/;
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>>rovf
"Or did I misundertand you here completely?"

Yes. I will get that from the page listed. I need the ASCII representation to do so though, and that's what I'm after. >>graff
That seems to be on the right track. Never knew what ord() did. However, as before, I'm using utf8 or euc encoded strings, so ord returns the numeric representation of each byte, not each character. The above gives 6 distinct codes, not 3. My assumption is if I passed it iso-8859-1 encoded strings it might work, but my text editor (Kate on Linux) says they're not valid for that encoding, and chokes.

Wait, the values are actually just HTML representation (like © is the copyright sign). I guess I should just either plug my values into a calculator like below, or search for the table somwhere.
http://www.pinyin.info/tools/converter/chars2uninumbers.html

Sorry my confusion led to such a lengthy discussion. :?

... as before, I'm using utf8 or euc encoded strings...

Okay, how do you know when you're using one or the other? Does the web site (play-asia.com) support both encodings, and if so, how do you tell it which one you're using?

ord returns the numeric representation of each byte, not each character. The above gives 6 distinct codes, not 3.

6 numerics instead of 3 for that 3-character string definitely means "not utf8" (so presumably euc, based on what you've said); if the web site is looking for utf8-encoded numerics, you should use Encode to convert from euc to utf8, then use ord():

use Encode;
...

my $string = "...";  # wherever you get your euc string from;
$string = decode( "euc-jp", $string );  # now it's a utf8 string;

... # plug it into the url as described earlier
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What does "rovf" mean, and am I missing your point(s) completely? (sorry-- I just realized that "rovf" was another monk -- moving right along...)

Your descriptions and replies are a bit hard for me to follow. And what do you mean by "the values are actually just HTML representation"? There are numeric character entity references (both decimal and hex, used in HTML, XML, SGML), there are symbolic entity references (like "&aacute;"), and there are uri-encoded versions of these (with the punctuation marks converted to "%" followed by two hex digits).

Are you really still having a problem with this?

Okay, how do you know when you're using one or the other?

I change the character encoding in Kate. I actually copy, then change encoding, and then paste over.

6 numerics instead of 3 for that 3-character string definitely means "not utf8" (so presumably euc, based on what you've said);

You are right -- EUC gives 3, and utf8 gives 6. However, the ones EUC gives are not the ones I need. :)

And what do you mean by "the values are actually just HTML representation"?

Sorry, that sounds stupid. They are the decimal form of Unicode, which HTML can read as &#XXXXX;You can type in the above string into this little engine and have it spit out the result.
http://www.pinyin.info/tools/converter/chars2uninumbers.html

Are you really still having a problem with this?

I think I've got it now, but I still don't know how I can get this decimal value in Perl. If I pass a utf8 string to ord(), it gives me a value for each byte, not the double-byte character. I could do something tacky and pass my string in question to the aforementioned website to get the decimal value, but that seems overkill, to say the least.

I think I've got it now, but I still don't know how I can get this decimal value in Perl. If I pass a utf8 string to ord(), it gives me a value for each byte, not the double-byte character.

Only if perl doesn't know that the string really is utf8. If the string is coming from a data file, and you open that file without telling perl specifically what type of encoding to use for it, perl reads data from the file as bytes, and you need to decode() the string (using the Encode module) so that perl will see it properly converted/interpreted as utf8 characters, and the scalar variable holding the string will be flagged as such. Note the following:

# open an euc-jp file:
open( $inp, "<:encoding(euc-jp)", "some_file.euc" ) or die "$!";

while (<$inp>) {  # data will be decoded on input
    ... # so $_ will have its utf8 flag "on" and 
        #   s///, ord(), etc will use character semantics
}

# open a utf8 file:
open( $inp, "<:utf8", "some_file.utf8" ) or die "$!";

while (<$inp>) {  # data will be interpreted as utf8 on input
    ... # so $_ will have its utf8 flag "on" and... (same as above)
}
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If your string is based on some literal value in your perl script file, you have to make sure that the editor you use to compose the source code is saving the script as a utf8 file (and you probably need to put use utf8; in the script, so perl knows how to interpret the literal utf8 characters that it contains).

You sure? It must not be a utf string (you may need to decode it, see Re: iso-8859-1 code converter).

C:\>perl -e"print unpack q!H*!, chr 333"
c58d
C:\>perl -e"print ord chr 333"
333
C:\>perl -e"print chr 333"
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
+ì
C:\>perl -MEncode -e"print ord decode q!UTF-8!,encode q!UTF8!,chr 333"
333
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ō
Unicode Character 'LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH MACRON' (U+014D)
http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob?f=t/op/ord.t

graff

That worked. Thanks!
Definitely some good nuggets in this thread which went on a bit longer than I had anticipated.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions and patience.