Encoding issue in PerForm

[Nathan Schroeder]

Just wanted to share with the group a possible bug I found in PerForm - I 
say possible because it might be somewhere else in my code...  Basically 
the issue was this:  we have several complicated form pages with validation 
code for most of the fields, and every so often when a field would 
(correctly) fail validation the whole page would crash with "output 
conversion failed due to conv error" -- the page was no longer UTF-8...??!

Eventually I found that the crash was due to an ISO-8859-1 character (a 
mac-style apostrophe) in a different field.  Diacritics normally work fine 
in the app - on a successful submit, we save it to the database and always 
encode / decode it properly for AxKit.  But when a form field failed to 
validate, PerForm was trying to spit the raw ISO-8859-1 character into the 
UTF-8 xml for the field value, which of course failed down the road.

My solution was to modify PerForm.pm, in the textfield and textarea methods:
    ...
    # validate
    if ($params->{"__submitting_$fname"}) {
new-->        my $conv = Apache::AxKit::CharsetConv->new("ISO-8859-1", 
"utf-8");
new-->        $params->{$name.$index} = 
$conv->convert(($params->get($name.$index))[-1]);
        if (my $sub = $package->can($onval || "validate_${name}")) {
            eval {
            ...

This works for me, converting any input into valid UTF-8 and avoiding 
crashes if there's a validation error.  Does that make sense to be doing 
that here?  Is it a bug in PerForm or am I missing something in my 
code?  Seems like there's no other way to intercept those values and 
convert them to UTF-8...  In either case, thought I'd throw it out there 
for more experienced PerForm gurus to take a look at.

Thanks,
Nate
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