Thanks to both of you for your help. It turns out that perl 5.6 is reading our UTF-8 encoded file and expanding the 2 bytes unicode characters to 4 bytes. We are switching to ISO-8859-1 encoding until we can upgrade to 5.8.

In reply to Re^2: Writing utf-8 to a socket with syswrite in perl 5.6 by Anonymous Monk
in thread Writing utf-8 to a socket with syswrite in perl 5.6 by Anonymous Monk

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