All,

I have managed to fix my problem with the special characters.
Conversion to ASCII can be accomplished by including the following.

# Convert plus's to spaces
  $parseString =~ s/\+/ /g;

# Convert %xx URLencoded to equiv ASCII characters
  $parseString =~ s/%(..)/chr(hex($1))/ge;  

Browsers don't display "<" chars as it could represent a tag in 
html. To get round the problem, you need to do the following
conversion for the 'main' special characters in HTML.

# Convert < > & " to 'html' special characters.
  $parseString =~ s/&/\&amp;/g;
  $parseString =~ s/</\&lt;/g;
  $parseString =~ s/>/\&gt;/g;
  $parseString =~ s/"/\&quot;/g;

&lt;    < (less than sign) 
&gt;    > (greater than sign) 
&amp;   & (The ampersand sign itself) 
&quot;  " (double quote) 

FYI more info on special characters can be had here
http://www.sandia.gov/sci_compute/symbols.html

Cheers,
Dave.

At 12:13 PM 7/29/98 +0100, Dave Jones wrote:
>WEB Masters,
>
>Has anybody tried passing an xml/sgml code through a form, I've got 
>a perl xml parser which awaits the input from a web form. However 
>when the form data arrives, it is URL encoded. There are perl programs 
>which convert this back to ascii, however some of the xml characters
>namely "<" seem to corrupt the conversion, and when displaying back to
>the web page I end up with text which is only showing the non encoded
>characters.
>
>Cheers
>Dave.
>
>


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