Thanks muchly. You are correct that I am on 5.8.x (x==4).

utf8::decode I had not considered -- I thought maybe utf8::upgrade, but now it looks like that is only for actual Latin-1 strings.

What I think I'll end up doing is use HTML::Encoding to properly sniff out the encoding of various docs I pull off the Web from LWP, since I shouldn't be making assumptions about their encoding anyway. (In this particular case I have one doc I know is UTF-8, but it is entirely possible I'll come across other encodings down the line.) Then use Encode::decode to decode each doc (to a Perl utf8 string, if I understand correctly) based on whatever encoding I get from HTML::Encoding.

Tough going, this utf8 business.