Displaying foreign characters

I'm trying to write a little script that lifts some text (in Japanese) from a web page and spits it out in chat in SL ... it will eventually be a little newsreader thing.

I've got a nice PHP script that extracts the headlines from the web page via CURL, an LSL script that accesses my web page and fetches the text ... and the correct fonts installed ... but within SL, I'm only seeing garbage (boxes) in chat, not the correct text. Anybody have any ideas what I'm missing ... probably something obvious, but I've been banging my head on a wall for 3 days with this, so any advice would be appreciated.

Do you have the proper Japanese fonts installed on your local machine? I know I've seen instances of Japanese characters within SL being seen as similar "garbage" characters to others, but not myself. (not that I can read Japanese.. I just installed the fonts so that on those occasions I happen across a Japanese website, I see more than just question marks. )

LSL and unicode text do not like each other all too well. Best stick to standard ASCII text in scripts. Even when you fetch it from a website that displays it without problems.