G'day hsmyers,

When your source code contains UTF-8, you need to tell Perl about this. You do this with the utf8 pragma. See that documentation for more complete details on that (somewhat oversimplified) advice.

Here's my test:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;
#use utf8;

use HTML::Entities qw{encode_entities};

my $dash = 'DASH: "-"';
my $emdash = 'EMDASH: "—"';
my $endash = 'ENDASH: "–"';

print encode_entities($_) for ($dash, $emdash, $endash);
[download]

Output from this code:

DASH: "-"
EMDASH: "—"
ENDASH: "–"
[download]

Output after uncommenting "#use utf8;":

DASH: "-"
EMDASH: "—"
ENDASH: "–"
[download]