Note: you only get away succeed with what you did, because Portuguese uses Latin1, and because utf8::decode modifies its argument even on failure (which is surprising).

The utf8::decode expects octets, but you're trying to feed it with proper Unicode. Of course it fails (check return value), but nevertheless, for whatever vague reason, it converts the utf8 string to latin1-encoded string, -- only when, it seems, such conversion is possible.

use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;

my $x1 = my $x2 = 'ç';
die if utf8::decode($x2);

use Devel::Peek;

Dump $x1;
Dump $x2;

[download]

>perl test170921.pl
SV = PV(0xe1af88) at 0xd23560
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,IsCOW,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0xd6b458 "\303\247"\0 [UTF8 "\x{e7}"]
  CUR = 2
  LEN = 10
  COW_REFCNT = 1
SV = PV(0xe1af58) at 0xd22fc0
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,pPOK)
  PV = 0xd6b5a8 "\347"\0
  CUR = 1
  LEN = 10

[download]

So this encoding from utf8 to latin1 (even though you did it inadvertently with call to decode) is just a special narrow case of what I wrote in this thread about encoding to your system codepage when reaching outside from Perl, and decoding whatever you fetch back.

In reply to Re^2: Accent file names issue by vr
in thread Accent file names issue by ruimelo73

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