That sounds much better.

There *may* be a problem with accidentaly outputting the internal Unicode representation to a subsystem that requires classic 8 bit per byte stuff (e.g. print, file handling, network sockets, databases, etc).

You can try to use Encode to encode/decode internal Unicode to UTF8. E.g.:

use Encode qw(decode encode);
$characters = decode('UTF-8', $octets,     Encode::FB_CROAK);
$octets     = encode('UTF-8', $characters, Encode::FB_CROAK);
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You might have to do that in multiple places.

It's hard to give you any better information, a Short, Self-Contained, Correct Example would prove helpful in narrowing down the problem further.