Hi koha-devel, Because the story of Perl, MySQL, UTF-8 and Koha is becoming more and more complicated, I've decided to start my tests outside of Koha or any web server. I wanted to check that Perl and MySQL could communicate with UTF-8 data. What I did : 1. copy some UTF-8 strings from http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8-t1.html paste into a UTF-8 text file utf8.txt (open/past in UTF-8 console, with Vim having :set encoding=utf-8) 2. create a UTF-8 database with a simple table having a TEXT field $ mysql --user=root --password=xxx mysql> CREATE DATABASE `utf8_test` CHARACTER SET utf8; mysql> connect utf8_test mysql> create table strings (id int, value text); mysql> quit (no need to set connection character set to utf-8 in that case, default latin1 is fine) Note: my MySQL server is latin1... $ mysql --user=root --password=xxx utf8_test mysql> status Server characterset: latin1 Db characterset: utf8 Client characterset: latin1 Conn. characterset: latin1 mysql> set names 'UTF8'; mysql> status Server characterset: latin1 Db characterset: utf8 Client characterset: utf8 Conn. characterset: utf8 3. write and execute a Perl script which reads the UTF-8 text file, insert UTF-8 strings into database, retrieve UTF-8 strings from database, print UTF-8 strings to STDOUT. See details in attached file readfile_insertdb.pl. Important note: "set names 'UTF8';" is mandatory. Everything is *working fine*. My output is in UTF-8, I'm 100% sure of it. DBD::mysql : 2.9007 Perl : 5.8.7 MySQL : 4.1.12-Debian_1ubuntu3.1-log DBI : 1.48 (find your local versions with attached script versions.pl) I suspect that Paul's data stored in MySQL are not truely UTF-8. Maybe I miss the point, but it seems Perl, MySQL and UTF-8 are not working so badly altogether. Cheers, -- Pierrick LE GALL INEO media system