[Catalyst] utf8 chars in form elements

[Johan Lindström]

I had a problem and was wondering whether my solution was any good:

* Problem *
In the browser, I enter "Lindström" in a name field and save it to the 
database.

In the view template this value looks nice:
[% item.$column | html %]  -->  Lindström

In the form, as the value of an input element, in the edit template, the 
value looks weird, with ö being rendered as two chars (the multi-byte utf8 
char presumably):
[% item.to_field(column).as_HTML %]  -->  <input type="text" 
value="Lindströ"m">

The browser uses utf-8 from the HTTP header (and/or the <meta> content 
type, but it doesn't seem to matter that much). That's not a problem.

In SQLite I can see the double char when looking at the table with dbish, 
but Perl seems to handle that correctly, because the ö is there in the 
variable value when I look at it.

Class::DBI::AsForm emits HTML::Element objects. The problem seems to be 
HTML::Element's as_HTML method which calls 
HTML::Entities::encode_entities() and interprets the ö as two chars.


* Solution *
My solution was to explicitly leave everything alone, except for the 
"normal" HTML chars:
[% item.to_field(column).as_HTML('<>&"\'') %]  -->  Lindström


Now... is this a good solution? The right place to solve it? Is it the 
right thing?


/J