Metatagger Pre Processor | Strip off double hyphen

System

Hi,

I have a created a preprocessor script using perl. Iam able to replace special characters using the syntax $data=~ s///g;

Iam facing an issue when Metatagger does autosuggest on docs, ppt and xls when it encounters double hyphen (—), it replaces it with a question mark (?).

I thought it must be 'em dash' or 'en dash' and tried replacing the html equivalent i.e $data=~ s/—//g; but this doesn't help.

Has anybody faced this issue before? I also tried copying the character using vi editor but it appears as a dot (.), iam not able to identify what is this character.

Any Pointers?

Thanks.