morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi!

I work on a web-application that needs to generate XML in different encodings (utf-8 and iso8859-15), depending on the client.

I would like to generate the XML with TT, ideally with one shared template for both cases. (The problem is getting the interpolated variables encoded properly).

I have tried something like this: 

use strict;
use Template;

my $config = {
              ENCODING => "iso8859-15",
             };

my $template = Template->new($config);

$template->process("test.tt", { var => "gödel" });

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But it does not come out right - it comes out as utf8.

Can someone help me here?

The system is Ubuntu Server 10.04 with Perl 5.10.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Template Toolkit and different encodings
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Dec 23, 2010 at 00:57 UTC

    You appears to inventing configuration options. Template::Manual::Config makes no mention of an ENCODING configuration option. (Upd: There's an ENCODING configuration option for Template::Provider, but it only affects decoding. )

    Template Toolkit doesn't appear to do any encoding. No problem, that gives you greater flexibility. Just do the encoding yourself. 

    binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";

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Re: Template Toolkit and different encodings
by graff (Chancellor) on Dec 23, 2010 at 04:52 UTC
    Just to clarify a bit on what ikegami said above (and just to prove it for myself), here's a little test script to demonstrate a run-time choice of output encoding. When you run this on the command line with no args, the output will be iso-8859-15; when you add "utf8" as an option, that will be the output encoding. The template is the same in both cases. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Template;
use Encode;

my $encoding = 'iso-8859-15';
my @testchars = map { encode( $encoding, chr( $_ )) } ( 0xc0 .. 0xff )
+;

if ( @ARGV and $ARGV[0] eq 'utf8' ) {
    $_ = decode( $encoding, $_ ) for ( @testchars );
    $encoding = 'utf8';
}

my $tmpfile = "test.$$.tt";
open( TMP, ">", "/tmp/$tmpfile" ) or die "/tmp/$tmpfile: $!";
print TMP while (<DATA>);
close TMP;

binmode STDOUT, "encoding($encoding)";

my $tt = Template->new( INCLUDE_PATH => "/tmp" )
    or die "template init. error\n";

$tt->process( $tmpfile, { enc => $encoding, testchars => \@testchars }
+ )
    or die "template proc. error\n";

__DATA__
<html>
<p>This page should be using [% enc %].</p>
<table>
[% FOREACH i IN [ 0 .. 3 ] -%]
 <tr>
 [% FOREACH j IN [ 0 .. 15 ] %]
  [%- k = i * 16 + j -%]
  <td>[% testchars.$k %]</td>
 [% END -%]
 </tr>
[% END -%]
</table>
</html>

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      Thanks a lot for your feedback.

      One thing thougth:

      I will use TT via CGI::Application::Plugin::TT running under mod_perl.

      Does that change anything?

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        I will use TT via CGI::Application::Plugin::TT

        That's how I normally use TT as well. (I had to go back to the manual to see about running it by itself.)

        Does that change anything?

        No -- just make sure that STDOUT is set to the same encoding as the template string variables, as shown in the example; then use the plugin syntax in the normal way to invoke the TT "process" function.

        If you're sending HTML to a client, you might want to look up how CGI::Application manages the MIME header that precedes the <html> tag, so that the client (browser) knows what encoding to use. But if you're sending XML, then starting the template like this should suffice: 

        <?xml version="1.0" encoding="[% enc %]" ?>

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