For the 1st time i'm attempting to print out characters with perl that are non english, to be specific, french characters, and i'm getting the dreaded "Malformed UTF-8 character" error. locale -a shows all the french locales installed ( i wont list them unless requested ).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use utf8;

print "une certaine phrase aléatoire en français\n";
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The output is: une certaine phrase alatoire en franais

If someone could shed some light on how to output the correct accented characters, i would be grateful.