My impression is that you will always have problems with Unicode strings and Perl 5.6.

In my experience, HTML::Entities works just fine under Perl 5.8 with Unicode strings. The strings must be marked as Unicode, not just contain UTF-8 bytes. If the source isn't doing the conversion, you can do it manually with Encode. 

print encode_entitites("a\x9B\x{263A}");

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In reply to Re: HTML::Entities and multi-byte characters by iburrell
in thread HTML::Entities and multi-byte characters by bpphillips

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