Let me guess what the translation is:

À	->	└ Lower right box corner
Á	->	┴ Middle box bottom
Â	->	┬ Middle box top
Ã	->	├ Left middle box side
Ä	->	─ Center box bar horizontal

This is exactly the translation you would expect if the database is being filled with data in iso-latin-1 and the program extracting it is interpreting data in cp437. My guess is that you're looking at the database with the command-line mysql tool running inside a windows cmd window. (On a US version of windows)

Here's the truth: You're going to have to deal with character encodings; you can't just close your eyes and ignore them. So here's the short version, so that you have to deal with as little as possible:

The windows cmd window doesn't display things in iso-latin-1. Instead, it uses an old DOS character set that is compatible with iso-latin-1 essentially only for ascii. In short, perl's doing everything fine, but the dos box displays characters in its own special non-standard way. To see that this issue is the dos box, and not your script, at the cmd window say: type myscript.pl, where script contains iso-latin-1 characters.

To "fix" this problem, at the C:\> prompt, type chcp 850. Then re-run the command-line tool you have to investigate the database.

Update: Never mind; code page 850 alone isn't enough to get the DOS box to display things in iso-latin-1. This might work after saying chcp 850, assuming that your perl is version 5.8 or better:

C:\>mydatabaseexamcommand | perl -MEncode=from_to -pe "from_to($_,q[la
+tin1],q[cp850])"
[download]

@/=map{[/./g]}qw/.h_nJ Xapou cets krht ele_ r_ra/;
map{y/X_/\n /;print}map{pop@$_}@/for@/
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use DBI qw/:sql_types/;
#... 
$query->bind_param(1, 'A Â Ã Ä', SQL_VARBINARY );
[download]

What encoding is your source code in?

Do you get the same results if you insert user input into the database? What encoding is the user input in?

Makeshifts last the longest.

Sorry, I'm not sure about encoding. All I can say is that the perl code is save as plain text and user input is via a basic html <input type="text"> box inside a <form> with no enctype specified. The HTML is in latin1 ISO-8859-1.

As for entering directly into the Database, as I said, entering from the console produces prefect results, therefore it is nothing to do with the database as such, just the way in which the data gets to it via Perl and DBI.

The point about the source code is to do with your test code. What ends up in the database depends on a) the encoding of the source file and b) the locale your perl runs under. If Perl assumes the source is in a locale-specific 8-bit encoding, it will take the string’s bytes verbatim from the source code and put them in a non-UTF-8 string. Which means the bytes you have in your source would end up in the database.

But it’s a different question what happens when you stuff user input there. That too depends on what locale Perl is running under (mostly, whether it’s UTF-8), but the other factor is which encoding the user’s input had, which is clearly not necessarily the same as the encoding of your source code.

And whether entering text directly into the database from the console works correctly depends on what encoding your terminal emulator produces your input as, and what locale the commandline database utility runs under.

(Can you tell why I so wish everything was UTF-8 already? Layers upon layers, this is an onion of opportunities to screw up…)

Makeshifts last the longest.

The DB console application may be running with a different encoding than your Perl application, and/or it may be telling the DB explicitly what encoding it is using.

I would suggest (1)setting your HTML form's enctype explicitly, and (2)learning how to tell your DB that you are speaking a specific encoding. The latter might be a SQL statement, an option to your DBI->connect, or possibly some combination of the two.

It would help, a little, to know which DBD you're using.

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