POSTing content with accented characters

[John Blumel]

I'm new to using libwww (and to this list) and only moderately 
experienced with Perl. I'm currently working on a set of scripts to 
bulk load some data into a MediaWiki wiki that I'm working with several 
other people to set up. For the curious, the wiki focus is the writings 
of Patrick O'Brian. We have a number of resources that people have 
developed over the years, including a glossary of all non-English words 
used in O'Brian's books. The glossary includes terms from a number of 
languages, some of which use accented characters, esp. French & Irish.

I've written a bot, using LWP, to upload articles extracted from the 
glossary and it works fine for those that don't contain accented 
characters. Unfortunately, articles containing accented characters have 
those characters corrupted when they are uploaded. I've been able to 
deal with these characters when they end up in the URL as the page 
title in the wiki (by converting them to '%xx', although URI:Escape 
doesn't seem to work for this) but I can't seem to figure out how to 
get the article content with these characters up to the wiki without 
corruption.

OS = Mac OS X 10.3, perl version = 5.8.1, LWP = latest from CPAN
Here's my function to POST the articles:
sub SubmitArticle
{
# get params
my ($refArticle) = @_;
# retrieve an Edit page for the new article and get the edit token
my $url = $gWikiURL . $refArticle->{title} . $gActionEdit;
my $response = $gBot->request(GET $url);
my ($editToken) =
   ($response->content =~ m/.*value="(.*?)".*name="wpEditToken"/s);
# create & send the submission request
$url = $gWikiURL . $refArticle->{title} . $gActionSubmit;
$response = $gBot->request(POST $url,
    Content_Type => 'form-data',
    Content              =>  [wpSave      => "Save page",
                                         wpSection   => "",
                                         wpEdittime  => "",
                                         wpEditToken => $editToken,
                                         wpSummary   => $gSubmissionComment,
                                         wpTextbox1  => 
$refArticle->{wikitext}]);
# return the outcome based on the response status
return $response->is_error?$FALSE:$TRUE;
}
The text causing the problems is in $refArticle->{wikitext} and I get 
the following message from perl when running the script:

   "Parsing of undecoded UTF-8 will give garbage when decoding
    entities at /Library/Perl/5.8.1/LWP/Protocol.pm line 114."
But, of course, I don't know how to correct this problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, and, of course, I'd like to 
figure out the problem with URI::Escape not escaping these same 
characters in the URLs -- these are in,

   $refArticle->{title}
also seen in the code above.
John Blumel