AFAICS it merely removes the UTF-8 flag, as the program below seems to demonstrate
Yes,and that's what it's supposed to do. 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;

$a = "\x{100}";
$b = Encode::encode_utf8($a);
print "a = ", join(',', map ord($_), split //, $a), "\n";
print "b = ", join(',', map ord($_), split //, $b), "\n";
__END__
$ perl /tmp/p
a = 256
b = 196,128
$

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$a is a string containing 1 character, which happens to have a utf8 representation that takes two octets; $b is is string containing 2 characters, which represent each of the octets of $a's utf8 representation.

PS your if statement has the wrong logic; it prints "differ" when eq matches.

Dave.

In reply to Re: What does Encode::encode_utf8 do to UTF-8 data ? by dave_the_m
in thread What does Encode::encode_utf8 do to UTF-8 data ? by scollyer

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