David Graff wrote:
Looking at the source for CGI::Util, it appears that disabling the
utf8 flag is intended as a feature, not a bug:
I think that is just due to the low level nature of escape(), because
escape() doesn't care about characters, just byte sequences.
I would guess that
there is no way for "unescape" to "know" when a given input string
shouldbe decoded as utf8 data. Only the calling app can know that,
I'd pretty much agree. So is there some way that I have missed to
tell CGI.pm how the query string should be decoded? Or some obvious
way to extend CGI.pm that I haven't thought of?
I'd like a way to tell CGI.pm how to interpret characters once it has
reconstructed the byte sequence. Then I'd like $query->param('name')
to always give me a scalar with utf8 characters and the utf8 flag set.
A string in a scalar which doesn't have the utf8 flag set isn't that
useful _in perl_, right? (That is, unless it's ascii only.) Perl
wouldn't know how to interpret characters. The application might, but
to Perl it's unstructured binary data.
-Stephen
