Thank you very much for your replies / comments Dave, Ken and ikegami!
"use utf8;" seems to do the job which surprises me as I probably misunderstood what it does.
Besides the - hopefully - solution provided by all I appreciate the side suggestions made.
'\xE4 was a typo I cut off the rest: '\xE4lter ...'

Posting SSCCE code is a bit of a challenge for me as my problem is the data inserted into the database.
I am always suspicious of what kind of data I have in the database in the end,
even if it looks correct at first sight. At the moment it looks correct and with other approaches I get errors.
The source file imported is encoded in UTF-8.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use utf8;
use open IN  => ':encoding(UTF-8)';
open (DATA, "source.txt") || die "error opening file";
while (<DATA>) {
    my $add;
    if ($_ =~ /behälter/i) {
        $add->{Category} = 'Resttonerbehälter';
        $add->{Description} = $_;
    }
    my $added = $DB->table('tablename')->add($add);
}
close DATA;

[download]
The values of $add->{Category} and $add->{Description} are both inserted into a database with latin1_swedish_ci collation. I would have expected these values to cause problems with the "use utf8;" but it seems like they are latin1 and I guess if I would want them to be UTF-8 I would have to encode them and the encoding of the strings have nothing to do with "use utf8;".

In reply to Re: Perl encoding problem by derion
in thread Perl encoding problem by derion

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