thanks for the tips. It does seem that 5.8 is *much* better at handling unicode strings. doing encode_entities("a \x{9B} \x{263A}") in 5.6 yields: 
a › ☺

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In 5.8 it yields: 
a › ☺

[download]
which is what it should be.

However, the string coming from the database (MySQL) still doesn't print correctly. I'm wasn't familiar with the Encode module that you mentioned but when I do a Dump (using Devel::Peek) on the string I pull from the database, I can see that it doesn't have the UTF8 flag that the string I create manually does. I tried doing a: 
my $str = decode_utf8($data);

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which worked splendidly and did exactly what I wanted it to. Do you know if this is SOP when working with MySQL? (i.e. will I have to do this on any string that I pull from the database?)

In reply to Re^2: HTML::Entities and multi-byte characters by bpphillips
in thread HTML::Entities and multi-byte characters by bpphillips

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