Question

I need to get a string from <STDIN>, written in latin and russian mixed encodings, and convert it to some url:

$search_url = "http://searchengine.com/search?text=" . uri_escape($query);

But this proccess goes bad and gives out Mojibake (a mixture of weird letters). What can I do with Perl to solve it?

Answer 1

Before you can get started, there’s a few things you need to know.

1. You’ll need to know the encoding of your input. “Latin” and “russian” aren’t (character) encodings.

2. If you’re dealing with multiple encodings, you’ll need to know what is encoded using which encoding. “It’s a mix” isn’t good enough.

3. You’ll need to know the encoding the site expects the query to use. This should be the same encoding as the page that contains the search form.

Then, it’s just a matter of decoding the input using the correct encoding, and encoding the query using the correct encoding. That’s the easy part. Encode provides functions decode and encode to do just that.