It seems to work for me: 
$  perl -E 'use utf8; my $data = "text - abcd"; say "$data";'
text - abcd
$
$ perl -E 'use utf8; my $data = "text – abcd"; print "$data";'
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
text – abcd
$
$ perl -E  'use utf8; my $data = "text – abcd"; binmode STDOUT, ":utf8
+";  say  "$data";'
text – abcd

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It might be hard to see the difference on the screen, but I zoomed on the output and I can confirm that I have really printed two different species of dash.

In reply to Re^3: Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected continuation byte 0x96, with no preceding start byte) by Laurent_R
in thread Malformed UTF-8 character by Yllar

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