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

It does? What am I missing about the second dump, the one from 5.8.4? 

--------------
5.8.4
--------------
SV = PV(0x44c3d64) at 0x10590f4
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK)
  PV = 0x450ab24 "\245"\0
  CUR = 1
  LEN = 2

[download]

That looks like perl is tossing away half of the bytes long before I returns it to any output. I don't think it's a problem with how the output is interpreted, just the fact that the output is half as wide as it should be (5.8.4 tossed away the missing \302)

In reply to Re^4: UTF8/Unicode Confusion by jk2addict
in thread UTF8/Unicode Confusion by jk2addict

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