Quick response to part of that response, thanks for the demo code.
the &#####; comes from perlmonks.org substituting the japanese text I had thrown in as an example html presentation of it:)
Comment on Re: Re: (Decimal Char Values) Unicode Pack/Unpack Woes
What I want to know is how perlmonks did exactly that (converted UTF-8 to &#nnn; format (in case they played with that, it's amp, pound, digits, semi)), since that's exactly what I need to do!
Sad thing is, I know I did it once! And if you can't help me directly, perhaps you can remember how I did it last time? ;)
thx.