http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=1221572


in reply to special characters in parsed json rendering badly in browser

Whenever you're unsure about the content/encoding of a string, use Devel::Peek:
use Devel::Peek; Dump $decoded->{description};
It will tell you if the string is already utf8 decoded or not. Paste the result here, if unsure.
Also you might want to read https://perlgeek.de/en/article/encodings-and-unicode