in reply to Perl Template UTF8

OK, adding <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> to my header seems to have sorted this problem!

That’s fine and a good idea—it SHOULD be the first <head> child—but the most important place to solve it is in the response headers. For example–

perl -MCGI=header -le 'print header(-charset => "utf-8")'

But in whatever server idiom you’ve adopted.