perlquestion cLive ;-) Or at least, that's my guess. I'm not sure what I should be looking for. The charset used by my table is latin1. I checked the http header of the generated html: <code>Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1</code> ie, latin1. Now, my biggest issue here is that I don't know what exactly the issue is that I'm meant to be examining. What changes a correct display of Español in the DB and when testing in the shell to EspaÃ±ol in the web page output. Anyone got any pointers? update: When I call the test page using wget, the output displays correctly in vi, so I'm assuming that the issue is in what the browser thinks the output is. Hmmmmm. update 2: changing the charset through header_props() to 'utf-8' presents the data correctly. So, I'm assuming that MySQL is throwing out the data as utf-8. Well, getting *some* progress here ;-)