Cant get perlmonks.org to handle utf-8 very well either :-)

Not at all, actually. PerlMonks pages are encoded using iso-latin-1. As such, all data submitted must be iso-latin-1 encoded. Characters that aren't in iso-latin-1 can't be submitted.

As a form of wishful thinking, your browser submits HTML/XML escapes for characters that can't be submitted. This doesn't work well when HTML isn't expected (inside of <code></code> tags).