Could you please help me with this little script?

I am trying to pre-parse (i.e. check that I can get the data I need) a JSON file from the UK Charity Commision. The data source is not known for being well-formated but I am pretty sure the issue here is with my code and (lack of) understanding of character encoding!

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;
use utf8;
use JSON;

$/ = undef;
open my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', 'publicextract.charity.json' or die 
+$!;
my $data = <$fh>;
close $fh;

$data =~ s/^\x{feff}//;  # Strip off BOM

my $json = decode_json $data;  #  <-- Wide character in subroutine ent
+ry at json.pl line 15.

foreach my $j(@$json) {
    print "$j->{'charity_contact_phone'},$j->{'charity_contact_email'}
+\n";
}

print "\nComplete!\n\n";

[download]

The documentation for decode_json says it takes a UTF8 encoded string. So I have saved the JSON file as UTF8 using TextPad and opened the file with the same encoding. But, decode_json is croaking Wide character in subroutine entry

What have I overlooked?

In reply to Wide characters and UTF8 by Bod

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