Try dumping the data in hexadecimal ... or just the first few bytes of it ... in order to see for yourself exactly what the database record contains. (You can use 'hexdump' on Linux.) Is it the correct byte sequences? If so, then "you have an encoding problem." Some player – it could be Perl, or it could even be your shell – does not recognize that the data is supposed to be Unicode. It's printing it as ASCII. Encoding options for a shell (window ...) might be a system preference.