Yes, it does that and some more (see the documentation). Since there are no utf8 characters in your script and since you are handling the CGI parameter decoding yourself explicity then there is no need to use this module. Without it everything seems to run smoothly for me and, according to your follow-up post above, also for you.

In reply to Re^3: Can't decode ill-formed UTF-8 octet sequence <FF> at /usr/share/perl5/CGI.pm line 1116. by hippo
in thread Can't decode ill-formed UTF-8 octet sequence <FF> at /usr/share/perl5/CGI.pm line 1116. by nikolay

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