(here I tried to paste the actual hiragana letter あ but it did not work out well inside the code markup.)
You could use charnames, like this:
print Dumper encode 'utf8', "Hiragana Letter \N{HIRAGANA LETTER A}";

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This works with PerlMonks, and if you use a web interface to your version control system, it will look nicer there than the "¿" or whatever gets displayed there.

If your Perl is older than v5.16, it needs an explicit use charnames; to work

In reply to Re^2: utf8 characters in Data::Dumper by soonix
in thread utf8 characters in Data::Dumper by remiah

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