Thanks for all the great suggestions. I should point out that the procedure in my original post is not my usual way of downloading from perlmonks. Rather, in the spirit of an SSCCE, it was a way I felt that any monk could duplicate the problem. I now know that the key to all of the methods is correctly specifying the encoding (cp1252) of the perlmonks download. The problem is so rare, that I do not need a general solution. I can use any of your suggestions when the need arrises.

I do understand that some of your suggestions were 'workarounds' to make this particular program work with a different character. This was my first choice until I had a better understanding of the real problem.