Thank you very much, Your Mother!

This works wonderfully, and it makes sense given the known cause of the encoding corruption.

use v5.16;
use utf8;
use open qw( :encoding(UTF-8) :std );
use Encode qw( encode decode );

while (my $damaged_text = <DATA>) {
    chomp $damaged_text;

    my $repaired_text = decode('UTF-8', encode('UCS-2LE', $damaged_text));

    say $repaired_text;
}

close DATA;

exit 0;

__DATA__
敒›剕䕇呎
敌馀⁳潧琠韦겜鯥↽

This prints…

    Re: URGENT
    Let’s go to 日本国!

…as expected.

In this case, use utf8 is required.

In reply to Re^2: How to Fix Character Encoding Damaged Text Using Perl? by Jim
in thread How to Fix Character Encoding Damaged Text Using Perl? by Jim

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.