in reply to special character printing issue

Well, that code does no printing :)

What does Data::Dump::dd( $smtpban ); print?

ddumperingBasic debugging checklist to visualize your data (lesson courtesy of Basic debugging checklist and brian's Guide to Solving Any Perl Problem )

perlunitut: Unicode in Perl#I/O flow (the actual 5 minute tutorial) and Is there a way to automatically decode or encode?