You can probably tell I don't understand HTTP responses very well; I was considering this comment of yours:

That said, you don't need to do ANY of this. You just use HTTP::Response's ->decoded_content method and it will decode the content for you.

I was trying to figure out how to do that, but wasn't able to figure it out from reading the documentation. In any event, back to Plan A:

 print join " ",
     LWP::UserAgent->new->get("$url")->content_type, $/;
[download]

Oddly enough that works, but only returns this:

content type: text/html
[download]

The charset is not included, although when I use the same call on the MS or Google sites as in your example, it does.

Confused? yes. :-(

Thanks for your patience, and apologies for not getting it.