PerlMonks delivers pages in iso-8859-1, so the form content must be encoded using the same.

Hoping for the best, some browsers HTML-encode characters that aren't present in the form's charset. So if I enter "♠" into the form, my browser sends in "♠". Outside of code tags, that sequence gets echoed back by PerlMonks so you see "♠".

Of course, code tags encode HTML meta-characters including "&", so the sequence gets encoded and appears as "♠".