use utf8 does not(!) influence Perl's handling of Unicode data: it only warns Perl's compiler that UTF-8 characters may be present in the source code. If your source-code contains UTF constructions then you must use this pragma in order to cause the source code to be correctly parsed – without this, it might be mis-parsed. But this will not affect what you see on your screen or web-page, which must be separately informed that UTF appears in the data if this is not their default. To remove all doubt, divert this output to a file and then use a hexadecimal viewer to look at the actual byte sequences.