Further to hippo's point, you can also specify the encoding as an option to slurp. From the doc to Path::Tiny :

$data = path("foo.txt")->slurp( {binmode => ":raw"} );
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"Reads file contents into a scalar. Takes an optional hash reference which may be used to pass options. The only available option is binmode, which is passed to binmode() on the handle used for reading."

Hope this helps!