Thanks, this helped a lot. The content in question was being bassed through HTML::FromText and getting snarled up. I figured that FromText would do the right thing with utf-8 so when it failed I thought it must be something exotic. Silly me. It turns out the machine this is on has 5.6.1 Perl that doesn't do utf-8 particularly well.

Your discussion pointed to the way for me to hadle it though; I'll just use a lookup table to handle the problem characters for the time being until the Perl gets upgraded.

John