Your data is not ASCII.

From the documentation for cat on my system: 

-v Non-ASCII characters (with the high bit set) are printed as `M-' 
(for meta) followed by the character for the low 7 bits.

[download]

Edit: That's all, really. The below advice may not be needed as your only symptom seems to be that cat -v on your system doesn't display the characters correctly, as documented.

You should decode the data, or try adding at the top of the script: 

binmode STDIN, ':utf8';

[download]

See Encode, as well as perlunitut and perluniintro.

update: added links to docs
The way forward always starts with a minimal test.

In reply to Re: What's the 'M-' characters and how to filter/correct them? by 1nickt
in thread What's the 'M-' characters and how to filter/correct them? by sylph001

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