Dealing with binary data and WWW::Mechanize and encoding stuff

[friedo]

Greetings!

I've run into some confusion with an encoding issue. I'm fetching some files with Mechanize (PDF's in particular) and passing them in-memory to another function, in this case Compress::Zlib::memGzip.

use Compress::Zlib;
...
$mech->get( $pdf_url );
my $compressed = Compress::Zlib::memGzip( $mech->content );

I'm getting the dreaded "wide character in memGzip" warning when I do this, which, if my understanding is correct, tells me a few things:

• Mechanize (or somebody) is storing the PDF data as a character string
• Since PDF is a byte format, I really don't want it in a character string
• memGzip doesn't want a character string either
• I have to somehow make it not a character string

And that's where I'm lost. I know how to convert character data to various encodings using Encode, and how to set binmode on a filehandle, but I can't seem to work out how to get that PDF data in the format it should be in.

Mech does have a save_content method which promises to save the content in binary mode if it's not a text/* MIME type (and I've checked that the MIME type is correct.) However, I'd hate to have to dump the content to a temp file just to read it in again.