G'day Bod,

This sounds somewhat similar to what was discussed in "Re: uparse - Parse Unicode strings", and subsequently in "Decoding @ARGV [Was: uparse - Parse Unicode strings]". Without any code, that's pure guesswork on my part; but it may be worth a look.

It's possible that your cron environment differs from the other one. There was some discussion of locale in the subthreads linked above. That could be another avenue for troubleshooting.