A BOM is part of the text and it's a (sort of) valid character "ZERO WIDTH NON-BREAKING SPACE". Your best bet is just to strip it off since it's use (aside from providing a BOM) isn't recommended anyway: 
while (my $line = <>) {
   $line =~ /^\x{FEFF}//; # strip BOM
   # rest
}

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In reply to Re: UTF-8 text files with Byte Order Mark by Joost
in thread UTF-8 text files with Byte Order Mark by muba

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