Time for some tests, then:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More tests => 2;

my $str = "/i/\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER
+ E WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTE
+R O WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETT
+ER Y WITH ACUTE}z/pl";

my $re = qr/^([\/\p{Word}]+)/;

like $str, $re, 'Matched';

$str =~ $re;

is $1, $str, 'Capture group 1';
[download]

Both pass here on v5.20.3 x86_64-linux-thread-multi.

Thanks. Both pass here as well.

1..2
ok 1 - Matched
ok 2 - Capture group 1
[download]

I've double-checked the source files, which are from WordPress via HTTP, and they get identified by the 'file' utility as "HTML document, UTF-8 Unicode text".

So there's nothing wrong with your version of perl and it correctly matches the UTF-8 accented characters with \p{Word}, and presumably also with \w if you change the value of $re thus: my $re = qr/^([\/\w]+)/;

Are you definitely decoding the contents of these files when you read them in your perl script?

Might also be worth checking the actual data in the data files with eg. hexdump.

---

🦛