[ Very curious behaviour of the list server and Mail.app -- I got the copy fine but the list message was missing a whole chunk. Here's another try ] I'm having a problem getting Unicode into MySQL using Perl and the DBI Module and wonder if anyone here can suggest what might be wrong. MYSQL is set up with character set utf8 throughout as shown after my signature. With AppleScript I have no problem getting the result I want with the following script: set _name to quoted form of (do shell script "perl -e ' print qq~\\x{90ed}\\x{6c5f}~'") set _town to quoted form of (do shell script "perl -e ' print qq~\\x{6c55}\\x{982d}~'") tell application "Terminal" to do script "mysql use test; drop table if exists china; create table china ( id integer, name text, town text ); insert into china values (1," & _name & ", " & _town & "); select * from china; exit;" in window 1 +------+--------------+---------------+ | id | name | town | +------+--------------+---------------+ | 1 | 郭江 | 汕頭 | +------+--------------+---------------+ But no matter what I do, if I try the same thing with Perl and DBI, I get the following result, that is the Latin-1 equivalent of the raw utf-8 bytes. +------+--------------+---------------+ | id | name | town | +------+--------------+---------------+ | 1 | éƒæ±Ÿ | 汕é | +------+--------------+---------------+ JD mysql Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.1.5-alpha, for apple-darwin8.4.0 (powerpc) using EditLine wrapper Connection id: 37 Current database: test Current user: jd@localhost SSL: Not in use Current pager: stdout Using outfile: '' Using delimiter: ; Server version: 5.1.5-alpha-log Protocol version: 10 Connection: Localhost via UNIX socket Server characterset: utf8 Db characterset: utf8 Client characterset: utf8 Conn. characterset: utf8 UNIX socket: /tmp/mysql.sock Uptime: 49 min 22 sec