I have two questions.

The first is how to get \*DATA, <DATA>, __DATA__ or whatever into the open() function below. I think I need that in order to illustrate the real problem which might be with the open() function. Or it might not be.

The real question is that the final result from print $xhtml->as_XML_indented; in the script below is showing mangled text and not presenting it as UTF-8. Whether that is happening during reading or printing I do not know and ask your collective wisdom on how to get the script to produce UTF-8 in its final result. It should show "smart" quotes around the "Def" string. 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use utf8;
use HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath;

use warnings;
use strict;


my $xhtml = HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath->new;
$xhtml->implicit_tags(1);
$xhtml->no_space_compacting(1);

my $filehandle;
 open ($filehandle, "< :encoding(UTF-8)", \*DATA)
    or die("Could not open file 'DATA' : error: $!\n");

# parse UTF-8
$xhtml->parse_file($filehandle)
    or die("Could not parse file handle for 'DATA' : $!\n");

close ($filehandle);

print $xhtml->as_XML_indented;
$xhtml->delete;

exit(0);


__DATA__

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>Foo</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p><a href="https://example.com/3/">Abc
      â&#128;&#152;Defâ&#128;&#153; (GHI)</a></p>
  </body>
</html>

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In reply to Difficulty with UTF-8 and file contents by mldvx4

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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