[Catalyst] Catalyst Unicode woes ...

[Tobias Kremer]

Following up on a conversion I started on the DateTime mailing-list I'd like to
ask if it is really neccessary to use C::P::Unicode if a site uses
utf8-encoding?

I have the problem that up until now everything worked absolutely fine without
C::P::Unicode, Template::Stash::ForceUTF8, Template::Provider::Encoding or any
other unicode plugin because I believed that if everything is utf8 you don't
really have to worry about it that much.

Now I recently incorporated DateTime::Locale to get a list of localized month
names. Spitting them out in my templates revealed a <questionmark> symbol
instead of all german umlauts. I took a look at DateTime::Locale and everything
seems to be correct (use utf8 at the top, etc) so this can't be the culprit.
encode("utf8")-ing the month names makes them look correct. I asked about this
on the DateTime mailing list and everybody suggested a truckload of plugins to 
incorporate in Catalyst which _ALL_ break everything else on my site except the
month names which are displayed fine then. It looks like everything gets
encoded twice when utilizing these plugins.

So I must admit I'm stuck with this. What is the best-practice for dealing with
Catalyst and utf8? Do I really need C::P::Unicode to make this work correctly?
What about the various TT plugins? And why the heck is everything double utf8
encoded when using these plugins that everybody else seems to use?

Thanks a lot for any input!

--Tobias