I think what's happening is that the original string is a Unicode string, then it gets stored in MySQL and retrieved again.

What comes back is a utf-8 encoded string, but it's not marked as a Unicode string in perl.

What you need to do is help perl out by marking the string returned by DBI/mysql as a Unicode string: 

use Encode qw(_utf8_on);
_utf8_on($field_value_returned_by_dbi);

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In reply to Re^2: Perl mySQL and £ signs by saintmike
in thread Perl mySQL and £ signs by davepreece

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