Hello wise monks

I'm running into a problem, and I can't seem to find any solution to it for the past 2 days. Here's what it's all about:

o I got an UTF-8 encoded XML file
o I parse it in and want to write some parts of it to a mysql database, ISO-8859-1 encoded

Everything is working fine, i'm reading the XML in, creating a hash out if it with XML::Parser, data gets written to MySQL aswell, but when I check the data in the table, it's UTF-8 again.

So I started playing with Text::Iconv, and came to this:

--- some stuff above ---

$parser->parsefile(shift @ARGV, ProtocolEncoding => "ISO-8859-1");

--- some stuff inbetween ---

my $converter = Text::Iconv->new("UTF-8","ISO-8859-1");
while (my($key,$value)=each(%attrs))
{
                push (@value_stack, { $key=>$value });
                if ($program_hash{$current_filmid}{$key} eq '')
                {
                        $program_hash{$current_filmid}{$key} = $conver
+ter->convert($value);
                } else {
                        if ($key ne "EventId" && $key ne "KanalId")
                        {
                                $program_hash{$current_filmid}{"$key.$
+value"} = $converter->convert($value);
                        }
                }
}
--- some stuff below ----
[download]

When I print the values out (eg: print $converter->convert($value)."\n"; ) it looks correct (eg ISO-8859-1 encoded), but when writing to the DB, it's UTF-8 again (meaning all special chars, like öäüéàè etc are some weird chars like Ã| etc...).

I'm really going nuts here, and would appreciate any help provided for this.

If more of the source is needed just tell me.

Thanks in Advance
Emanuel