I have the following fairly simple script to parse BookMooch data:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use XML::Simple;
use YAML;
use Encode;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new;
my $api_base = 'http://api.bookmooch.com/api/userid';

my $q = CGI->new;

my $user = $q->param('user');

$mech->get("$api_base?userids=$user");
die "Failed to get user $user from BookMooch"
    unless $mech->success;

print header, start_html, "\n" ;
my $xml = $mech->content;
# $xml = encode('iso-8859-1', $xml);   (doesn't fix the problem)
my $data = XMLin($xml);
print pre(Dump($data)), end_html;

[download]

When I run it, I get the following output:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
         "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-U
+S">
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
+" />
</head>
<body>

:1492: parser error : Input is not proper UTF-8, indicate encoding !
Bytes: 0xA3 0x31 0x20 0x31
                        <condition>Good condition. 1970 edition with n
+et cover price shown as 1 15s
                                                                      
+                        ^
 at /usr/lib/perl5/XML/LibXML/SAX/Parser.pm line 31

[download]

Uncommenting the line with encode, doesn't make any difference. I'm new to UTF-8 and encoding. What's the correct incantation for what I'm doing?

The input data is Latin-1 as far as I'm aware, and it's b0rking on a pound sign '£'

Any help would be much appreciated

--
Apprentice wetware hacker

In reply to UTF-8 problem parsing XML by rinceWind

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