Here's the offending thing (as displayed in a text editor) 
The Widget&reg is the perfect...

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What is this? I know & is the ampersand, and ® is the (R) symbol -- is this semi-mangled markup, with the amp 'double encoded'? I'm trying the 
 my $octets = encode("utf8", $x, Encode::FB_DEFAULT);
 $x = decode("utf8", $x, Encode::FB_DEFAULT);

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suggestion and the character is still there. Should I be using  use bytes; as well?

All are welcome to downvote this node and just tell me to "RTFM", but I've been trying to make sense of the docs, and golly, UTF is hard to understand. For me, at least. Mea culpa.

I just want to strip this stuff and make it go away from my files.

utf befuddled --

water

In reply to Re: UTF-8 Malformed Char Error -- how to find and remove bad chars by water
in thread UTF-8 Malformed Char Error -- how to find and remove bad chars by water

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