I will assume that you used. the precompiled shell tool available from the SQLite site, and that you. ran it in Apple's Terminal program without doing anything to change character settings. The shell tool supplied by the sqlite development team is the ultimate guide about how to use sqlite. If it looks wrong in the shell tool, it's wrong. The fact that the shell shows the contents of your string as incorrect Unicode characters shows that the string is wrong. You. have put the wrong thing in the database and are, naturally, getting the wrong thing back out again. Your perl code appears to get the 'right' thing because it's doing one thing to get characters into the database and the opposite thing to get them back out again. I have no trouble at all entering a unicode character using the shell tool. Which unicode character are you trying to enter and what keys are you using to enter it ?