The page from the gwinnettdailypost site was in 8859-1 (Latin1) encoding -- good news, because it should be a simpler problem to investigate. First, assuming you are on Unix, ensure you are running perl from a Latin-1 environment.

• % export LC_ALL=en_US.iso88591

Then run your perl program.

If the above was not sufficient to fix the problem, check if the db server is setup for latin-1 -- or create a new database that can handle Latin-1 .

Here are the commands if you are using Postgresql:

• SHOW server_encoding ;
• CREATE DATABASE myname WITH encoding = 'LATIN1';