How are you processing the text? How is it getting encoded to UTF-8 characters? It is really '®' or '®' (and something else is encoding the ampersand to &). It the former, you should be double decoding it. If the latter, then presumably your XML parser is resolving the entity into the Unicode character. Hopefully, it is marking the Perl string as Unicode.

UTF-8 is pretty easy to understand. It is a way to encode Unicode characters that can be processed by tools that handle normal C strings. All ASCII characters have the same encoding. Larger characters are encoded in two or more bytes. If you get a malformed char error, it could mean your string was corrupted. More likely is that it isn't a UTF-8 string, but some 8-bit encoding like Latin-1. The proper solution is to translate the other encoding into UTF-8 and let Perl handle it.

In reply to Re^2: UTF-8 Malformed Char Error -- how to find and remove bad chars by iburrell
in thread UTF-8 Malformed Char Error -- how to find and remove bad chars by water

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