handling UTF-8 characters in LWP module

hello,
i am trying to write a bot to download wkipedia artictles using
WWW:Wikipedia, a subclass of LWP::UserAgent. pages returned by the
wikipedia
server contains utf8 characters such as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH
DIAERESIS. however, i see that the lwp module is not handling the
search
results as utf8 encoded. i see that th e character Ö is treated as
three
individual bytes and not a single character. how do i specify that the
lwp useragent must handle utf8 chars?

thanks in advance,
dave