[Mediawiki-l] bots and non-english characters?

Wed Apr 6 18:59:14 UTC 2005

Has anyone had success with submitting data that contains non-English 
characters via a bot? I'm currently working on some Perl scripts to 
extract and upload data from a number of external sources related to 
the subject of our wiki -- thanks, James Birkholz, for the extension 
code by I decided to go another way -- and some of this material 
consists of translations of foreign (esp., French and Irish) terms that 
contain various accented characters.

The basic bot is working -- login, upload 1 or more articles, logout, 
produce some reports on what happened -- but I haven't had much success 
with uploading articles non-standard characters. For those familiar 
with Perl, I'm using the LWP modules (LWP::UserAgent and 
HTTP::Request::Common, mostly) and thought I might be able to handle 
this using the URI::Escape module, but no success.

The best workaround I have so far is to replace the characters with 
HTML entities but that interferes with searching for the terms once 
they are uploaded.

Any suggestions, advice, or pointers to helpful resources would be 
appreciated.

John Blumel