Re: accented characters are garbled

[Anonymous Monk]

I'd wager your first problem is getting your terminal encoding correct. Since the file is UTF-8, and you can't "view" it with curl, your terminal encoding most probably isn't UTF-8. Which terminal are you using? A Linux one or something like PuTTY? Poke around the options a bit.

(ā is a tricky character: it can't be found in the usual legacy latin encodings. That means you can't translate it to a latin encoding -- your best bet is to get UTF-8 working correctly and forget about playing with other character encodings.)

[spspspsp]

Yes, it was the terminal setting. Changing vt100 to xterm shows characters fine. Now, how do I replace accented characters with ascii? E.g. ó to o. I tried the following, but it did not work:

$city = "Sprîngfíèld";
use utf8;
utf8::upgrade($city);
utf8::encode($city);
print $city;

[Anonymous Monk]

Don't use utf8, use encode/decode, read perlunitut: Unicode in Perl#I/O flow (the actual 5 minute tutorial)

[Anonymous Monk]

So if you got the display working, why do you now want to strip the diacritics?

Anyway, Text::Unidecode. And while I'm at it, here's the boilerplate code for getting Perl reasonably UTF-8:

use utf8;                  # upgrades your strings
my $city = "Sprîngfíèld";
binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(utf-8)");
print $city, "\n";


# use decode_utf8() when reading from e.g. a file
# alternatively, see the binmode() call above
use Encode 'decode_utf8';
my $input_raw = <STDIN>;
my $input = decode_utf8($input_raw);
print $input, "\n";