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

Hi Monks, I'm searching for a mechanism to encode a string like "Hello ä" into "Hello ä/ä" to write it in a html file. I need this because i'm only generate a html snippet which is be included in a whole html page. The whole html page hasn't the utf-8 charset and i cannot handle it. I tried to use HTML:Entities but this only gave me some strange codes like this: öä for öa My Code is: 
open(OUTTEMP, '>:utf8', "$outfile");

print OUTTEMP "some text" . encode_entities(öä) . "some text\n";

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Thanks, Yeehaw
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Re: How to encode special characters like ä,ß,é,... in html unicode codes like ä or ä
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 11, 2011 at 11:33 UTC

    From your output of öä, I would assume that you have not told Perl that the data you are reading in is UTF-8 as well. You will need to make sure that Perl knows that the data you are reading in are UTF-8 characters, by using either the parameters for open or by telling your database driver to mark the data as UTF-8.

    If all else fails, you can manually mark your data as containing UTF-8 encoded data using Encode::decode($data, 'utf-8'), but I would do that at the source instead of doing it at the end of processing.

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      Thanks, with the Encode::decode($data, 'utf-8'), it works great.
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Re: How to encode special characters like ä,ß,é,... in html unicode codes like ä or ä
by moritz (Cardinal) on Oct 11, 2011 at 11:28 UTC
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      But why there are coming these strange codes from HTML:Entities?
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Re: How to encode special characters like ä,ß,é,... in html unicode codes like ä or ä
by trizen (Hermit) on Oct 11, 2011 at 14:30 UTC 
    use encoding 'utf8';
use HTML::Entities 'decode_entities';

my $string = 'Hello ä/ä ... ß,é';

$string =~ s/(.)/ord($1)>160?'&#'.ord($1).';':$1/ge;

print "$string\n";                     # encoded
print decode_entities($string),"\n";   # decoded

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    The principle is this: 
    use encoding 'utf8';
print '&#' . ord('ä') . ';';   # prints ä

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Re: How to encode special characters like ä,ß,é,... in html unicode codes like ä or ä
by Khen1950fx (Canon) on Oct 11, 2011 at 12:21 UTC
    I tried like this: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Entities;

my $e = "\366\344"; 
open OUTTEMP, '>', '/root/Desktop/html.log';
binmode OUTTEMP, ':encoding(utf8)';
print OUTTEMP "some text" . encode_entities($e) . "some text\n";
close OUTTEMP;

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    Or even easier: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Entities;

my $e = "\366\344";
print encode_entities($e);

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