Thanks for the help!

Actually, the above doesn't work, because '\251' (and all the other similarily structured codes) were being interpreted by perl as A SINGLE CHARACTER. Which is weird.

However, it turns out I've found a solution. The problem was that the file was not, in fact encoded in UTF-8, but was encoded in Western(ISO-8859-1).

I used xemacs to translate the page into UTF-8, and my problems more or less disappeared -- well, perl finally, grudgingly decided to recognize all the odd characters and I was able to get some useful work done!

Thanks again for the help!