I should probably say, "apparent solution" 'cause character set issues never seem to end.
However, combining Jon Gorman's recommendation with some Googling, I get: my $outfile='4788022.edited.bib'; open (my $output_marc, '>', $outfile) or die "Couldn't open file $!" ; binmode($output_marc, ':utf8'); The open statement may not be quite correct, as I am not familiar with the more current techniques for opening file handles that John mentioned. However, when I use those instructions to open the output file rather than what I had before, the copyright symbol does indeed come across as C2 A9 as it was in the original record. I didn't want to use the utf8, because I've tried that before and ended up with double-encoding (and a real mess). But I'll continue testing. The results of the googling I referred to can be found at: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/perl.perl4lib/sy7hqiBQ1yM Anne L. Highsmith Director, Consortia Systems TAMU Libraries 5000 TAMU College Station, TX 77843-5000 979 862 4234 hism...@tamu.edu