$ perl -MEncode=encode_utf8 -wE '$| = 1; my $buf = encode_utf8 chr(0xe5); print substr($buf, 0, 1); sleep 1; say substr($buf, 1)' | perl -CS -pe 1
å

##</code><code>##

$buf =~ s/^((?:[\x00-\x7f]+|[\xc0-0xff][\x80-\xbf]+)*)//;
my $newtext = $1;
utf8::decode($newtext);
$text_so_far .= $newtext;