I'm seeing "the £ character" as two glyphs everywhere in your post

Hmmm. Strange. I see one instance of where the pond sign shows up incorrectly in my original post.Its the first one in the second code block ($£=pop) which shows up as a broken utf char in my browser (ie ($��=pop)). Looking at the source, this is because of a bug in the autowrap code that is used to break long lines which is inserting

<font color="red"><b><u>&#173;</u></b></font>

in between two bytes of a valid 2-byte utf-16 character therebye causing it to be invalid. There is nothing I can do to prevent the autwrap code form doing this.

use the HTML Entity name

The problem with that is that in every case where I have used the £ character (except that one) in this thread, it has been embedded within <code>...</code> brackets, and (as far as I know), stuff inside code brackets shouldn't be modified before display, so embedding an HTML entity would produce equally confusing results. It would also be a pain to have to edit the code that looks fine in my editor and browser and works fine with perl itself, each time I paste it.

The code I am pasting into the edit field is valid utf-16 and (when the autowrap feature doesn't interfere), it should show up correctly as a £ sign in your browser if you have a utf-16 enabled font configured. It does so for me in Opera 6.1. (I just typed that last £ on my keyboard with no escaping of any kind).