outputs café for me

Thanks...I've just tried that over SSH on the server and I get the correct output.

So, I suppose that means the code to decode the URI Encoded characters is working and I need to look somewhere else!

Any suggestions why it would work at the command line but not when sent to a browser?

It looks like your é is the result of printing the encoded utf8 of é. You needed to print the decoded value. For example:

perl -we 'use Encode; $c = encode("UTF-8", "é"); $dc = decode("UTF-8",
+ $c); print "\$c = $c \$dc = $dc\n"'
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outputs: $c = é $dc = é

That makes sense thanks!

$reply->{'response'} = decode('UTF-8', $data{'userChat'}); seems to have done the trick on the test script...

So that's one problem solved. It seems I'm now getting encoding problems from AI::Chat, but only when I call the chat method, not when I call the prompt method. But that doesn't make a lot of sense as prompt uses chat...

I'll have to try and simplify the code and see if I can reproduce it!

Update:

This is the sort of thing I'm getting back from AI::Chat

{response: 'Ã\x83Â\x96zÃ\x83¼r dilerim, belki de sorumu yanlÃ\x84±Ã\
+x85Â\x9F s…rirken en keyif aldÃ\x84±Ã\x84Â\x9FÃ\x84±nÃ\x84±z Ã\x85
+Â\x9Fey ne?\n'}
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Another Update:

{
correction: 'Turkce alfabe oldukca turaf.\n\nThe correct sentence shou
+ld be: "Türkçe alfabesi oldukça tuhaf."\n\nExplanation:\n1. The word 
+"Türkçe" is not capitalized, it should be as it's a proper noun.\n2. 
+The word "alfabe" is also missing its possessive suffix, it should be
+ "alfabesi" to show that it belongs to Turkish language.\n3. The word
+ "turaf" is not a word in Turkish. The correct word meaning "strange"
+ or "weird" is "tuhaf".',
response: 'Evet, Türk alfabesi Latin alfabesine dayanır ve 29 harf
+ten oluşur. Her harfin belirli bir sesi temsil ettiği
+ni biliyor muydun?'
}
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The correction comes from the prompt method and the characters display correctly whereas the response comes from chat and the is unreadable...

I was curious how UTF-8 was converting a sequence of bytes to a code point that wasn't obviously related to the values of those bytes. With the help of UTF-8#Examples, here is how %C3%A9 (é) is converted to the code point 233. The bits for %C3 and %A9 are 11000011 and 10101001 (195 and 169). The first 4 bits of the first byte tells how many bytes are used for this character. In this case the first 110 means two bytes are used (1110 would mean 3 bytes etc). For two byte encodings the last 5 bits of the first byte are used for the higher order bits of the code point so (00011). The leading 1 and 0 bits (10) of the second byte are used to indicate that this is a continuation byte. The rest (101001) is used for the code point. So we end up with 00011 101001; printf "%s\n", 0b00011101001 gives 233.