What version of perl? What OS are you working on? 5.8 handles unicode better IMO. It really helps other know this stuff. Don't be surprised by problems dealing with Unicode as a universal issue either. Microsoft Word 2000 will not correctly encode certain unicode character sets that is says it supports and cannot even encode UTF8 properly! While on the Win2K - notepad.exe does this just fine! Microsoft told us to upgrade to Office XP. Certain modules have to be told very early that unicode is being used for them. Unicode is not very well understood by most folks.