Try changing your open line from 

 open MENU, "<menu.htm";

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to 
  open MENU, "<:utf8", "menu.htm";

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Otherwise Perl might well be treating the text read from that file as something else.

Update: If what you meant is that the file being read in from standard input is UTF-8 encoded then what you need is 

binmode STDIN, ":utf8";

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This presumably won't work if you're using multiple files through the magic filehandle. Actually, just to be safe, maybe you shouldn't use the magic filehandle.

In reply to Re: Regexp not performed when presented utf-8 data by Errto
in thread Regexp not performed when presented utf-8 data by muba

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