Hello! I'm using an API request to get some video descriptions from Youtube. Something like: 
#!/usr/bin/perl 
use LWP::Simple;  
use lib 'JSON253/lib/';            
use JSON qw( decode_json );     
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser set_message warningsToBrowser);
use strict;                     
use warnings;

my $url = "https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/playlistItems?part=sn
+ippet&key=$API_KEY";

my $result = get($url);
die "Could not get $url!" unless defined $result;

[download]
Then I decode the JSON response and load what I want into variables: 
$jsonstuff = decode_json($result);

$description = $jsonstuff->{items}->{snippet}->{description};

[download]
This all works, except that some video descriptions have weird characters in them. Some are emoticons. Here's an example from a description with an emoticon smiley at the end: 
"Happy with everything at the moment \x{1f60a}."

[download]
Another quirk is that some apostrophes get mangled. Here's another printed description: 
"It’s the fans who make it worthwhile."

[download]
I know it's a character encoding issue.. but is Youtube using a mix of encodings? I once got the apostrophe to print correctly by changing Windows-1252 to UTF-8 in one step. But the emoticons were still mangled. I should add that not all apostrophes are mangled. On some videos they come through fine. I wondered if it had to do with the uploader's text processing method. I've been searching most the day and trying various fixes, even from a number of perlmonks.org threads. But I haven't been able to make it work yet. Thanks

In reply to JSON character encoding by Bman70

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.