Thanks for your reply.

According to the header, the returned data is UTF-16LE, which I assume stands for little-endian. I am on a Mac, so I guess I'm big-endian, which would explain why I was getting Asian glyphs instead of my Adsense results.

I tried the Encode method you suggested, also with the variation 'LE' after the 16 (why not, I've tried everything else, it seems) but it didn't work. The \p{Digit} does match, but fails when used in conjunction with the date field separator (/) like so: \p{Digit}\\/.

I guess the problem comes down to endian-ness of the data returned. How do I flip flop the data so that the methods available to me (Encode:: and /usr/bin/iconv) will work for me?