Re^2: LWP::Curl and character encoding

I see under HTTP::Response, the options to retrieve raw content or decoded content.

But there doesn't seem to be a $response->type, where type returns something to indicate whether I should "decode the content" (i.e. an HTML file), or should get the 'raw' content' (i.e. it's binary and decoding it would mess it up).

If I call content, then I get a raw, but HTML isn't decoded to UTF-8, but if I call decoded content, then it says: "Returns the content with any Content-Encoding undone and the raw content encoded to perl's Unicode strings."

By encoding a 'gif' file into UTF-8, it will corrupt the file. So this doesn't seem to help, but seems to be stuck at the same place I was before -- knowing the content of the the buffer before looking at it! *lame!*...

This seems so basic -- there has to be a way to properly retrieve a URI, and process it or store it, unprocessed -- I'm just missing it...since it seems like a very common problem, I can't imagine that everyone goes and starts hacking headers and trying to figure out what combination of 'use utf8/local/bytes'...etc, is necessary to make sense of this ...

Comment on Re^2: LWP::Curl and character encoding

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Re^3: LWP::Curl and character encoding by Anonymous Monk on Nov 16, 2010 at 13:37 UTC
http://search.cpan.org/grep?cpanid=GAAS&release=libwww-perl-5.837&string=decoded&i=1&n=1&C=0	[reply]
Re^4: LWP::Curl and character encoding by perl-diddler (Chaplain) on Nov 16, 2010 at 14:09 UTC
Right...and what are you trying to say? Sorry, but your reply is a bit too cryptic to be useful.	[reply]
Re^5: LWP::Curl and character encoding by Anonymous Monk on Nov 16, 2010 at 14:35 UTC
You said By encoding a 'gif' file into UTF-8, it will corrupt the file but that won't happen My advice, grep and read the files that match that grep. I know its a lot, but its what I do. I also use WWW::Mechanize subclass of LWP::UserAgent	[reply]