That does not work. It has the same effect as commenting out the "use open" line. Try it in an UTF-8 terminal with LC_CTYPE set properly to utf-8. The print to STDOUT corrupts the character. 
karoshi:~>LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 ./u8demo.pl
I read a line, that is 1 chars long.
That line is: �
That line in ascii is: o

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In reply to Re^2: How to sanely handle unicode in perl? by Sec
in thread How to sanely handle unicode in perl? by Sec

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