lhoward is correct with his answer. To expand on that: if you are using the CGI module (as you should) then you can output this type of header using something like print header(-charset=>'big5'). A big reason why you need to do this is that the CGI module by default outputs charset=ISO-8859-1; this must be explictly overriden. You probably have seen that, at least with your web browser, a META tag is not enough to override it.