The problem with my created database file is to do with 'extended' characters. E.g. the length of the following track title:-

Cú Chullain

is counted by the empeg player (and by perl on my Mac) as 11, but when I create the database file on my RedHat linux server, it counts the length as 12. So whenever one of this type of 'accented' characters appears it gets the length wrong. I have tried to not use anything except regular ASCII, but some names/titles really need them and it's not practical to strip them out and have to monitor every new track, just in case.

So I really need to find a solution and count the length consistently.

I know I could let the empeg create the database each time, but this is something I specifically want to avoid, so it's not a viable solution. I just want to make perl on the RedHat machine count the same number of chars.

Anyone any suggestions as to how to do this?