I think you might notice an improvement if you added this line above the print statement: 
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";

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In reply to Re: How do I convince my Perl script that UTF-8 from an HTML form really is UTF-8? by graff
in thread [SOLVED] How do I convince my Perl script that UTF-8 from an HTML form really is UTF-8? by Cody Fendant

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