[tpm] PostgreSQL INSERT/UTF-8 problem

[Madison Kelly]

Rob Janes wrote:
> oops, first reply went to Madison alone ...
> 
> I think this is better ...
> 
> use Encode qw(from_to decode);
> 
> my $data = "Résidence";
> from_to($data, "iso-8859-1", "utf8"); ## assuming Résidence is encoded 
> in 8859-1
> or
> my $data = decode("iso-8859-1", "Résidence");
> 
> both of these will create a utf8 string from Résidence.  However, 
> depending on the original encoding of Résidence, what's stored in the 
> database may or may not be what you want.
> 
> In other words, the lack of an error message is not indicative of it 
> working.
> 
> -rob

I am not sure if this is the most ... appropriate way to solve the 
problem, so I would still love to have some feedback if you (or anyone) 
has any.

I got it working this way:

- Read the data from the website and push it into a hash (hidden input 
values stored as "$input{name}=value;".
- Loop through the '%input' hash keys and populate a new hash 
'%enc_input' with the same format.
- Read the old values from the database into a matching hash called 
'%old_input'.
- Pseduo-code:
foreach $key (keys %input)
{
	if ( $input{$key} ne $old_input{$key} )
	{
		# Update the DB using the '$enc_input' hash value.
	}
}

It's ugly as sin, but it seems like the only time I need to use 'Encode' 
functions are in the actual PgSQL INPUT or UPDATE calls; not in the 
comparison of the value either from the HTML page or from the database.

Odd.

Thanks for your help, Rob and Cees!

Madi