OK, not exactly sure how or why, but switching my database from UTF8 to utf8mb4 worked. See this guide for details.

$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff Deacon Curate Priest";
$nysus = $PM . ' ' . $MCF;
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In reply to Re: Storing UTF-8 data into database from scraped web page by nysus
in thread SOLVED: Storing UTF-8 data into database from scraped web page by nysus

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