> Does that help?

It doesn't seem to be properly utf8 encoded and as you already said the JSON is malformed because you didn't read it completely.

use v5.12;
use warnings;
use Devel::Peek;
use utf8;


my $str = "\x{FEFF}['what','ever']";

$str =~ s/^\x{feff}//;

Dump($str);

[download]

SV = PV(0xe9cea8) at 0x24f1008
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x2565b28 "['what','ever']"\0 [UTF8 "['what','ever']"]
  CUR = 15
  LEN = 24

[download]

so you should take care to read the data properly.

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

In reply to Re^5: Rogue character(s) at start of JSON file (BOM; dumping references) by LanX
in thread Rogue character(s) at start of JSON file by Bod

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.