You answered how Lotus Notes encodes (UTF-8, Base64).
You answered how you decode (Base64, UTF-8).
But my question was how do you encode what you decoded.

decode produces strings, an opaque type. You can't output decoded strings. Only bytes can be outputted to a system file handle.

I also asked how do you view the characters. On the console? As a web page cause you're writing a CGI app?