Putting non-ascii text into a char column

Hi all. I have two Informix servers -- a production box and a test box. Passwords to our vendor's software are stored encrypted in a char(20) column. I want to copy passwords from production to test. I've written a perl script to fetch the password from production and I want to put that password into the same table/column on the test box. The problem is that the encrypted passwords have non-ascii characters. update user_mst set access_code = "blahblah" where id="235112" This update command gives me this: DBD::Informix::db do failed: SQL: -202: An illegal character has been found in the statement. at ./3000create.pl line 27. How can I copy the contents of one char column to another if the data contains "illegal characters" ?? Thanks, Brian McLaughlin George Fox University (503) 554-2587