I've used Unicode in Perl extensivly, and logged many of the bugs noted in ActiveState's database. Bleading edge kind of guy, I guess.

re "something like that": you mean Illegal UTF-8 codes? If you are getting the data via OLE from Excel, look at a switch to enable proper Unicode returns. I ran into that a short time ago with Word, and there is a node where someone answered me. Set UTF8 as the Code Page in the OLE module, but I forget the exact call. I still had issues, so find my previous note...

—John