> What am I missing?

the interactive debugger is redirecting STDOUT with every eval. You need to do it inline 

  DB<3> binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; print "\x{263A}"
\u263A

[download]

of course your terminal° must also be capable to display smileys :)

I think if you want to change STDOUT globally for the debugger, some of the unicode flags in perlrun should do. (untested)

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

°) in my case emacs inside the console

In reply to Re^2: Problem with escape sequence \x for hex with spaces "\x{ 263A }" by LanX
in thread Problem with escape sequence \x for hex with spaces "\x{ 263A }" by LanX

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