> I would recommend to use utf-8 in your web application.  But you have to
> make sure that you really generate utf-8 strings _and_ that your web server
> issues a header with the correct encoding:
>
> Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
>
> You can check that with the option "--save-headers" from wget, and also in
> most browsers (for example in Mozilla try View->Character Encoding).
>
> I suspect that your web server does not respond with the correct header,
> probably because the web server configuration contains an
> "AddDefaultCharset" directive.  Try to override that in the virtual host
> configuration with:
>
> AddDefaultCharset Off
> # Alternatively:
> AddDefaultCharset utf-8
>
> See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset for
> details.  Many Linux vendors have this directive in their web server
> configuration.
>
The pages was indeed being sent to the user as UTF-8 (as specified above).

> In order to make absolutely sure that you really spit out utf-8, you should
> do this:
>
> Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LANGUAGE=nb_NO.utf8");
> Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LANG=nb_NO.utf8");
> Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LC_ALL=nb_NO.utf8");
> Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("LC_MESSAGES=nb_NO.utf8");
> Locale::Messages::nl_putenv ("OUTPUT_CHARSET=utf-8");
> setlocale (LC_ALL, "");
>
> This should do the trick.

This did not work at all. But when I saw the reference to Locale::Messages I
took a look at the POD and I noticed the bind_textdomain_codeset function.
So what I was left with was this, and now it magically works!

       Locale::Messages::bind_textdomain_codeset('portfolio','utf-8');
       setlocale(LC_MESSAGES,$lang_default);

BTW: The $lang_default variable contains nb_NO and
nb/LC_MESSAGES/portfolio.po contains ISO-8859-1 strings, so the recoding does
indeed work as it should now.

Thanks a lot for sorting out my little headache!

Regards,
Robin Smidsrød