Package main; require HTML::Entities; my ($json,$json_cleared); if($query->param('json')) { $json = new JSON->utf8(1)->decode($query->url_param('json')); # html entity: while (my $json_key = keys %$json) { $json_cleared->{$json_key} = HTML::Entities::encode_entities($json->{$json_key}); } } sub change_gal_name { my $gid = $json_cleared->{'gid'}; my $name = $json_cleared->{'newname'}; # ... }