I'm completely lost in encodings :(

I'm reading data using LWP. When the data contains umlauts, things start to get weird and I get lost.

As the whole script is already very complex, let me try to give examples first before I start thinking about an example script.

For the example I use perl debugger. <&p>

After reading my data one of the strings looks like this:

  DB<11> x $str
0  'Künzler'
  DB<12> x Encode::is_utf8($str)
0  ''
  DB<13> x length($str)
0  8
  DB<14> x substr($str,0,3)
0  'Kü'
[download]

So I think my issue already starts here as the data I read is displayed correctly but perl treats it as bytes.

I do not know what to do with that string so that perl handles it correctly.

  DB<20> x Encode::decode('utf8', $str)
0  'K?nzler'
[download]

(It was the Questionmark on a square that was displayed). That seemed wrong, but when I tested by reading from an utf-8 file opening it with '<:utf8' I got the same result, so obviously it's correct that way.

So as a test I changed my string here by decoding it as utf8.

In the next step, the string is handed to MIME::Lite::TT::HTML and by that to Text::Table. Finally it's send to me by mail.

When I look at the mail's source, the umlaut is (quoted printable) represented by '=FC' and, unfortunately, displayed as a questionmark in a square :(

I know I should have some sample code, and I will try to write some, but I hoped that in the meantime someone here with more experience already has a hint for me, where to debug further or how to fix it.

As far as I know, Text::Table requires perl strings to properly format tables. But shouldn't my string be a perl string when decoded?

Many thanks in advance.