You mention Notepad.

1. case - you have your data all as hardcoded string in index.pl

Include the pragma use utf8; in the index.pl. Make sure to select UTF-8 encoding when saving the file.

2. case - you have your data in an outside file

I assume your data is in Windows-1253. When reading it into variables, decode it. Or handle the decoding automatically through an IO layer during opening the file:

open my $fh, '<:encoding(windows-1253)', 'filename.dat' or die "could 
+not open filename.dat for reading: $!";
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When writing the XHTML out:

• Set the proper HTTP header.

  header('Content-Type' => 'application/xml+xhtml;charset=UTF-8');
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• Encode all text and variable contents that's going out to produce the web page:

  binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';
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• Set the proper XML PI.

  print '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>';
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