Hello again Anonymous Monk,

Everything you are looking for is here A UTF8 round trip with MySQL.

More specifically:

use DBI();
    my $dbh = DBI->connect ('dbi:mysql:test_db',
                            $username,
                            $password, 
                            {mysql_enable_utf8 => 1}
    );
[download]

Let the MySQL do all the work for you. By doing this This step connects to the database, and tells DBD::mysql to auto-convert to/from UTF-8..

Hope this helps, BR.