working with unicode from javascript via ajax on the server, use: http://search.cpan.org/~taniguchi/URI-Escape-JavaScript-0.04/lib/URI/Escape/JavaScript.pm in conjunction with HTML::Entities::encode http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Perl_Programming/Unicode_UTF-8 unicode tables http://www.utf8-chartable.de/unicode-utf8-table.pl?start=8192&htmlent=1 http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html http://www.javascripter.net/faq/mathsymbols.htm #unicode #perl