When you have the time, you should see Re: CGI.pm and encoding HTML entities in param(),

CGI hidden params vs. character encoding,

perlunitut: Unicode in Perl,

A UTF8 round trip with MySQL,

http://perlgeek.de/en/article/encodings-and-unicode,

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)