Globalisation, UTF8 and characters with Accent.

[rekha sarith]

Hi,

I am very new to MySQL. I am trying to build a DB with names from all over the world. Most of the names have various accents associated with them.

1) The "Names" field has a "utf8_general_ci" collation
2) Reading names using XML and inserting them into the DB using a "perl script"

I am unable to get all the accents stored in the correct way! The names have "?" or have the Ascii code like "ě" or "ū". How Do I store it correctly?

I am unable to figure out if it is a "MySQL" Collation problem or a perl Problem.

Any help / advice is much appriciated.

Thank you in advance.