You have put me on the right track. I have found gvim commands to tell it that input is in CP1252 and output should be in utf-8. This converts the 96 to e28093 (u-2013 EN DASH). The resulting file runs in perl and pastes pack into perlmonks correctly. The character still does not display correctly in gvim or the windows command prompt. The best solution probably it to download notepad++, but it seems like overkill to learn another editor to solve such a rare problem.