You might want to try setting your locale to one that supports Unicode:

use locale;
use POSIX 'locale_h';

my $loc = "en_EN.utf-8";
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, $loc)
  or die "Invalid locale $loc";
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Or use a UNIX-GNU/Linux command like recode or iconv to convert your input to your character set. Hope that helps.

Addendum: I'm not sure this will work on XP, but perldoc perllocale should be able to help you--and there is a Windows version of recode.