Question

In Perl, how can I convert string containing utf-8 characters to HTML where such characters will be converted into &…; ?

Answer 1

First, split on an empty pattern to get a list of single characters. Then, map each character to itself, if it is ASCII, or its code, if it is not:

use Encode qw( decode_utf8 );

my $utf8_string = "\xE2\x80\x9C\x68\x6F\x6D\x65\xE2\x80\x9D";
my $unicode_string = decode_utf8($utf8_string);

my $html = join q(),
    map { ord > 127 ? "&#" . ord . ";"
                    : $_
        } split //, $unicode_string;