We have some cPanel accounts with Cyrillic language set to default, which makes cPanel to return escaped utf8 messages while you operating with the API.
One of the example messages I was getting , looked like this :
\x{437}\x{430}\x{43f}\x{438}\x{441} \x{437}\x{430} \x{434}\x{43e}\x{43c}\x{435}\x{439}\x{43d} \x{201c} some-user-domain.com \x{201d} \x{432}\x{435}\x{447}\x{435} \x{441}\x{44a}\x{449}\x{435}
\x{441}\x{442}\x{432}\x{443}\x{432}\x{430}.
which is not very eye-friendly.
Using simple perl code without additional modules
The simplest way of decoding the string is by using some perl code that looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Decode the string
my $string='\x{437}\x{430}\x{43f}\x{438}\x{441}\x{437}\x{430} \x{434}\x{43e}\x{43c}\x{435}\x{439}\x{43d} \x{201c}some-user-domain.com\x{201d} \x{432}\x{435}\x{447}\x{435} \x{441}\x{44a}\x{449}\x{435}\x{441}\x{442}\x{432}\x{443}\x{432}\x{430}.' =~ s/(\\x\{[0-9a-z]+\})/qq{"$1"}/eerig;
print "Decoded string: $string \n";
The magic happens inside the in-place substitution (=~ s/(\\x\{[0-9a-z]+\})/qq{“$1”}/eerig) , the flags are doing the following:
‘ee’ -> evaluate the right side as a string then eval the result. This actually calls eval() upon “\x{YYY}”
‘i’ -> case-insensitive
‘g’ -> do the job for all matches
‘r’ -> in-place string modification
You could also use this as a perl one-liner:
(here we have removed the ‘r’ flag from the substitution)
echo '\x{434}\x{43e}\x{43c}\x{435}\x{439}\x{43d}' | perl -pe 's/(\\x\{[0-9a-z]+\})/qq{"$1"}/eeig'
Using String::Unescape to do the conversion
You could also use the module: String::Unescape to do the job.
In this case your script will look something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use String::Unescape;
my $string='\x{437}\x{430}\x{43f}\x{438}\x{441}\x{437}\x{430} \x{434}\x{43e}\x{43c}\x{435}\x{439}\x{43d} \x{201c}example.com\x{201d} \x{432}\x{435}\x{447}\x{435} \x{441}\x{44a}\x{449}\x{435}\x{441}\x{442}\x{432}\x{443}\x{432}\x{430}.' ;
print String::Unescape->unescape($string) . "\n";