Interesting. None of these characters have code points above 255, and yet you sometimes get the error in decode($text).

You said the table encoding is latin-1. My current guess is, you get your information decoded as if it was latin1. Most of it looks like bytes, but occasionally, latin-1 text decodes to wide characters and blows up decode (which only expects bytes). What if you encode $text back to latin-1 to get bytes, then decode those as UTF-8? This transformation seems to be reversible as long as all bytes round-trip, that is, MySQL's interpretation of "latin-1" is the same as Perl's and has a meaning for all 256 possible byte values.

In reply to Re^5: Encoding of emoji character by Anonymous Monk
in thread Encoding of emoji character by dcunningham

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