in reply to Character issue when pulling data out of MSSQL using DBI
For what it's worth, it doesn't appear to be a character encoding issue. It's really weird that "C" remained unchanged while "F" became "`". In fact, I suspect that "7SR2CPH" and "&%$?F" and "*I0" were concatenated, and that the problem occurred before the concatenation. And that's assuming you're looking at the right field and record.