If you are running this on Redhat 8/9, you could be running into the infamous utf-8 LANG problem. If the $LANG environment variable has a .utf8 on the end, then Perl 5.8.0 treats any input as being UTF8 encoded, even if it isn't. If this is the case, include a new setting for LANG in the script that starts up apache eg if $LANG is en_US.utf8, then add LANG=en_US to the script.