Whenever I run an update or produce static stats pages i get the following error:

Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x6d, immediately after start byte 0xe4) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/robots.pm line 414. Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x68, immediately after start byte 0xe4) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/robots.pm line 414. Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x6b, immediately after start byte 0xe4) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/robots.pm line 414. Malformed UTF-8 character (1 byte, need 3, after start byte 0xe9) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 263. Malformed UTF-8 character (1 byte, need 3, after start byte 0xe9) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 263. Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x67, immediately after start byte 0xf3) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 269. Malformed UTF-8 character (1 byte, need 4, after start byte 0xf5) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 269. Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x6c, immediately after start byte 0xf3) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 269. Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x74, immediately after start byte 0xe1) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 269. Malformed UTF-8 character (1 byte, need 4, after start byte 0xf5) at /home/linHost/www/webstats/cgi-bin/lib/search_engines.pm line 269.

I suspect this is todo with the dots (umlouts?) over letters and hats in languages like french. When I removed the problematic entries I get an error about the number of search engine entries being wrong.

Any idea on a solution?