I have a Word doc with the following line

“a”

Method 1
Using Win32::OLE to extract the line

my $encoded = encode_entities($line);
print "$encoded\n";
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Outputs

“a”
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Method 2
Using Win32::OLE to first save as utf8

my $text;
{
  open my $fh, '<:utf8', 'utf8.txt';
  $text = <$fh>;
  close $fh;
}

my $encoded = encode_entities($text);
print "$encoded\n";
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Produces:

“a”
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I don't believe method 1 output conforms to HTML4.01 but that method 2 does.
I intend to use method 2 but is there a better way to do it?

Update:

For what it's worth the text extracted by method 2 also displays correctly in a tk text widget. :-)
Update 2: Corrected the HTML spec.