It turns out that the problem was the slurping.
When I added 
$/ = "\n";

[download]
after 
my $string = <INPUT>;

[download]
things worked fine. I had done my test use of the function before slurping up the actual data. Annoying.

In reply to Re^2: problem with Unicode::UCD by rubenstein
in thread problem with Unicode::UCD by rubenstein

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