You didn't show any relevant input data, but from your description, I have to wonder whether you tried the following and whether it worked:

my $answer = decode('UTF-8', $answer);

[download]

You decode external input when reading, and you encode strings before writing them as output.

In reply to Re: UTF-8 and Unicode the hard way by Corion
in thread UTF-8 and Unicode the hard way by Anonymous Monk

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