jcmoon - 10:16 pm on Aug 25, 2008 (gmt 0)

We have scripts for an English site which we're getting to work on a Japanese counterpart. It's a shared Linux server, and our scripts are all Perl. I'm stuck in the product-search script.

Let's say visitors put Japan (in japanese) into the product-search ... the URL turns into http://example.co.jp/search?qu=%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC

For what it's worth, there's only a few dozen Japanese strings that should expect results in this product-search script, so if we can merely recognize those few, we'd be fine.

So here's my question:
When the above happens ... when the visitor ends up at that sort of URL ... what does the Perl script see as the contents of that variable?
How do we jump from whatever Perl sees, to something we can recognize (like 日本, or %26%2326085%3B%26%2326412%3B, or even %E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC)?