See HTML::Escape - most likely you don't want to escape stuff yourself.
For your second question, you will need to think about the encoding that the text is in (as submitted to your program, see the Content-Encoding header), and the encoding your source code is in (did you place use utf8; at the top of your script).
In reply to Re: Stripping bad characters in rss
by Corion
in thread Stripping bad characters in rss
by htmanning
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