From: Jakub Narebski Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2012 20:10:06 GMT Subject: [PATCH/RFC (version B)] gitweb: Allow UTF-8 encoded CGI query parameters and path_info Message-ID: <201202022110.07127.jnareb@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: Gitweb tries hard to properly process UTF-8 data, by marking output from git commands and contents of files as UTF-8 with to_utf8() subroutine. This ensures that gitweb would print correctly UTF-8 e.g. in 'log' and 'commit' views. Unfortunately it misses another source of potentially Unicode input, namely query parameters. The result is that one cannot search for a string containing characters outside US-ASCII. For example searching for "Michał Kiedrowicz" (containing letter 'ł' - LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE, with Unicode codepoint U+0142, represented with 0xc5 0x82 bytes in UTF-8 and percent-encoded as %C5%81) result in the following incorrect data in search field Michał Kiedrowicz This is caused by CGI by default treating '0xc5 0x82' bytes as two characters in Perl legacy encoding latin-1 (iso-8859-1), because 's' query parameter is not processed explicitly as UTF-8 encoded string. The solution used here follows "Using Unicode in a Perl CGI script" article on http://www.lemoda.net/cgi/perl-unicode/index.html: use CGI; use Encode 'decode_utf8; my $value = params('input'); $value = decode_utf8($value); This is done when filling %input_params hash; this required to move from explicit $cgi->param(