You are very close, and well done for showing a detailed example.

The main (Unicode) problem is that perl doesn't know that the strings that you are extracting from the Html source are UTF-8. You can either explicitly convert them, as graff shows, or better still use decoded_content() instead of content() in your LWP code:

    ...

    if ( $response -> is_success ) {
        $htmlsource = $response -> decoded_content();

        $writestring = parse( $htmlsource );
    }

    ...
[download]

This will get you most of the way there if you view the output file. However, you will notice that the backquote-like (inflection?) character doesn't display in the default Arial font (the other Unicode characters do).

The solution in this case is to switch to a full Unicode font in Excel such as 'Arial Unicode MS'

    ...
    my $arial_unicode = $workbook -> add_format(font => 'Arial Unicode
+ MS');
    $sheet -> write ( 0, 0, $writestring, $arial_unicode );
    ...
[download]

--
John.