For what it's worth, I've been struggling with a very similar problem for ages, and in the end it appears that HTML::Entities was causing my problem. Since you're using it here, have a look at that. It encodes the characters directly (using char()) I believe, and I don't think it supports UTF8. I could be wrong, but that's what was causing my problem.

In reply to Re: UTF-8: Trying to make sense of form input by Nigel Peck
in thread UTF-8: Trying to make sense of form input by cosmicperl

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