Gan Uesli Starling wrote:

Solved! My generic installation of Apache 2 on NetBSD 1.6
held this line...

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

...so I changed it to...

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

...then re-started Apache and that fixed it.

You should remove the line altogether, or change it to
AddDefaultCharset Off

...unless you are certain that every single text/* document you serve is going
to be UTF-8 encoded. You are in effect overriding the meta tags altogether by
using this feature.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset

Mike

The ex-post-facto escaping of Unicode via Perl, interestingly,
seems to overcome that Apache option regardless. I will retain
the Perl script as a hedge against such time as when I might
encounter a similar problem on a server which is not under my
control.

 <(+)__       Gan Uesli Starling
  ((__/)=-    Kalamazoo, MI, USA
   `||`
    ++        http://starling.us