The weird chars at the beginning of the file are, as I have learned, a BOM. The file is in fact unicode (UCS-2LE ?). Try something like 
use Encode qw(encode);
...
#my $thearesp = $theresponse->content;
my $thearesp = encode("iso-8859-1", decode("UCS-2LE", $theresponse->co
+ntent));

[download]

See Encode.

Some nits:

--shmem

1)this prefix is often used in other languages to denote a variable holding a scalar, but it's not needed in Perl: the $ already does this. 

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

In reply to Re: Problem parsing through downloaded web pages by shmem
in thread Problem parsing through downloaded web pages by malomar66

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