Special characters in tpl

System

I have a tpl that reads a field from the dcr and then via perl in that tpl uses DBI to write to a MSSQL database. The problem I am having is that the fields in the DCR can contain french characters (or German or Spanish) . When I try to populate the MSSQL table they end up as garbage. I know the MSSQL tables can accept those characters as I can paste them directly into the database. How can I get those characters to appear correctly? I've been investigating changing character encoding (which I'm fuzzy at). I've read that I might have to actually save the tpl and dct files in utf-8.

Any help would be appreciated. If need be I can include code.