Corion provided the correct answer, but you failed to verify it. If you print a decoded non-ASCII character, then you get the wide character warning. This is exactly what happens when you print the result of your own substitutions:

$ perl -E "print qq(\x{100})"
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
Ā

Printed output needs to be encoded into a byte stream which the receiving side is able to understand. In many cases like contemporary Unix terminals, UTF-8 is a good guess - which is the encoding your $answer came from.

In reply to Re^3: UTF-8 and Unicode the hard way by haj
in thread UTF-8 and Unicode the hard way by Anonymous Monk

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