"This indeed looks like Unicode/UTF8 issue, appreciate any help providing solution."

My two previous posts in this thread were purely to help a new user. I have no knowledge of Vertica Analytic Database, vertica-client or UL_VERTICA.pm; furthermore, I have no access to CentOS or Fedora Linux systems. I can provide the following, very general, potential solution (on a Cygwin system which was fully updated yesterday).

$ uname -a
CYGWIN_NT-10.0-19045 titan 3.4.7-1.x86_64 2023-06-16 14:04 UTC x86_64 
+Cygwin
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I created the module Dummy_Vertica intended to emulate what I think might be in UL_VERTICA:

$ cat /home/ken/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode/Dummy_Vertica.pm
package Dummy_Vertica;

use v5.36;
use utf8;

sub test_wide_character_print {
    say 'SLAP example:';
    print "SLAPØ\n";
    say 'IMP example:';
    print "\N{IMP}\n";
    return;
}

1;
[download]

I wrote the following script, test_1.pl, to emulate the type of thing you're seeing:

$ cat /home/ken/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode/test_1.pl
#!/usr/bin/env perl

use v5.36;

BEGIN { say "Perl version: $^V"; }

use lib '/home/ken/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode';
use Dummy_Vertica;

Dummy_Vertica::test_wide_character_print();
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Output:

ken@titan ~/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode
$ ./test_1.pl
Perl version: v5.36.0
SLAP example:
SLAP▒
IMP example:
Wide character in print at /home/ken/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode/Dummy_Vertica.pm line 10.
👿

As you can see, there's two types of problems: ▒ instead of Ø; and, the "Wide character ..." message. Both can be resolved by using the open pragma. Here's test_2.pl which is identical to test_1.pl except for the addition of one "use open ..." statement:

$ cat /home/ken/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode/test_2.pl
#!/usr/bin/env perl

use v5.36;

use open OUT => qw{:encoding(UTF-8) :std};

BEGIN { say "Perl version: $^V"; }

use lib '/home/ken/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode';
use Dummy_Vertica;

Dummy_Vertica::test_wide_character_print();
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Output:

ken@titan ~/tmp/pm_11153782_unicode
$ ./test_2.pl
Perl version: v5.36.0
SLAP example:
SLAPØ
IMP example:
👿