Thanks for the info (I'm unable to choose font Arial Unicode MS so I still can't display the data properly in my browser, but that's not a problem).
Here's a small script that reproduces the problem I'm interested in: use MARC::Charset qw(marc8_to_utf8); binmode STDOUT, ":utf8"; my $marc8 = "\x31\x20\x1f\x61\x44\x6f\x6e\xeb\x74\xec\x73\x6f \x76\x61\x2c\x20\x44\x61\x72\xa7\xeb\x69\xec\x61\x2e\x1e"; my $utf8 = marc8_to_utf8($marc8); print "$utf8\n"; $utf8 above contains 2 null characters (per my earlier post). FYI I'm using MARC::Charset v0.96 with perl-5.8.8 running on Linux (Redhat-3 edition). Thanks, Michael