My Perl script accepts and processes input from a text field in a form on a web page. It was written for the English version of the web page and works just fine.
There is also a Chinese version of the page (a separate page, not both languages on the same page), and now I need my script to work with that. The user input on this page is expected to be in Chinese.
Expecting to need to work in UTF-8, I added
use utf8;
This continues to function just fine on the English page.
But in order to, for example, define a string variable for comparison that uses Chinese characters, I have to save the Perl script itself with utf-8 encoding. As soon as I do that, I get the dreaded 500 server error.
Clearly I'm going about this wrong and any helpful direction will be greatly appreciated/
Thanks.
EDIT - please see my clarification post below.