Well, the Dump outputs show that the function is correctly returning the unicode character 0xa5; it's just that the internal encoding happens not to be utf8. Using utf8::upgrade gets round whatever problem you're having because it converts the internal representation.

The problem must lie in how you're using the returned value. If for example you're just printing it to STDOUT, and if whatever's listening on STDOUT expects utf8 encoding (eg the terminal), then you need to let Perl know that any output on that file handle should be utf8 encoded, eg 

$ perl -e 'print chr 0xa5'|od -x
0000000 00a5
$ perl -e 'binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8"); print chr 0xa5'|od -x
0000000 a5c2
$

[download]
see perluniintro (in 5.8.x) for more information.

Dave.

In reply to Re^3: UTF8/Unicode Confusion by dave_the_m
in thread UTF8/Unicode Confusion by jk2addict

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