Some more gotchas I encountered along the way:

1) I use PuTTY to log in to Unix systems. In order for me to properly display UTF-8 characters, I needed to set my character encoding to UTF-8 in my PuTTY configuration. (Window/Translation.)

2) Some data providers may translate UTF-8 characters to their HTML character entity equivalents, and pass it off as UTF-8. To correct this, use the HTML::Entities package from CPAN, and call the decode_entities() function.