special chars generated when using HTML::TreeBuilder & HTML::Element

Question

I've two questions:

• If I take out any text using text() or as_trimmed_text() function and want to push in some element then do I need to use HTML::Entities::encode_entities? :

  my $text=$node->as_trimmed_text();
  
  $a->push_content($text);  # Do I need to use encode_entities here?
  

• Secondly after processing and generating whole html document using as_HTML() it's sometimes generating some special characters for example: Â(Â) as an extra char when all I see is single space in Dreamweaver.

Answer 1

I have two answers:

• Assuming that you want the content of $a to be the same as the content of $node, you do not need to encode_entities as push_content inserts the passed string as a text node rather than parsing it as markup. OTOH, if the content of $node is <span> (represented in HTML source as <span>) and you actually want $a to display <span> (represented in HTML source as <span>), you would call encode_entities on it.
• Chances are that your input text contains raw UTF-8 characters which the code is interpreting as Latin-1 or a similar encoding. The "single space" characters are actually U+00A0, non-breaking space, which is represented in UTF-8 by the two bytes 0xc2 0xa0, which when interpreted in Latin-1 are "Â" and non-breaking space.