Yeah, I'm not even sure what I was thinking. After thinking more about this, this question now seems incredibly stupid and weird even to me. I was trying to get a module called HTML::WikiConverter to work, but I keep getting either wide character errors or garbled text when trying to use it. I'm not sure what the hell I was even thinking trying to run the string through HTML::Entities first. Looking at the CPAN page for the HTML::WikiConverter module now, I realize that the module has a bunch of reports of UTF-8 issues - which is obviously causing the issues that I've been having.