You might want to take a look at also explicitly setting the character encoding in your HTML document, since that is where the javascript is getting a hold of it.
I am assuming, of course, that the client-side is what you believe is corrupting your data. If you're using UTF-8, you can tell perl to use UTF; :: This may be off topic, but I need help in determining where :: to go. I have set up a java script to insert (and select) :: from my database, the data in there contains extended :: characters, the word is Pr�nom :: :: When I select via a perl dbi script, the data is already :: corrupted (its Prenom). :: :: For reference, that is an accented e as in Pr\xE9nom. :: :: Perhaps it only requires setting up some sort of encoding. :: This is after all, only Latin1 encoding. :: :: Is there any way to tell perl to use this character set - :: rather than whatever it is using???
