Hi,

Thanks for the replies guys.

The file being read is already in "UTF8 without BOM"

The $country_name is a basic string (a-z0-9 etc)

I tried doing:

use Encode qw( encode );
$country_name = encode('utf8', $country_name);
[download]

..and that seems to have done the trick.

Man wish I had realised this hours ago.

Thanks a ton for the replies - you've saved my remaining hair ;)

Cheers

Andy