compare how the behavior changes with open my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', '../data/publicextract.charity.json' or die "Unable to read Charity JSON File"; compared to the open line you currently use.

I neglected to mention that I had previously read the file as UTF-8 in the way you suggest. But then decode_json complains about "wide characters" which I don't understand.

have your regex instead either search for the three bytes in octal with s/^\357\273\277//

That's the bit I needed!
I was getting thrown by the 0x1c56920 in 0x1c56920 "\357\273\277

That makes perfect sense except I don't understand what 0x1c56920 means in the output from the Devel::Peek Dump function.

In reply to Re^8: Rogue character(s) at start of JSON file (BOM; dumping references) by Bod
in thread Rogue character(s) at start of JSON file by Bod

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