Most Revered Monks,

I have a severe misunderstanding; how do encodings work in Perl?

I have a script that takes text as input and basically does several substitutions to it. The text itself contains cyrillic characters; some substitutions have non-ascii characters.

Actually, this script reproduces the problem: 

use utf8;

while (<>) {
        s/<</«/g;
        print;
}

[download]

If I try to use it on the console or redirect its output to a file, it keeps cyrillic characters but messes up the « (replaces it with �). But if I run it on a block in Vim, it does the right substitution but destroys cyrillic characters (replacing each of them with two unreadable bytes, obviously).

What should I do? Can someone point me to a comprehensive guide to encodings?

In reply to I/O encoding question by akho

Title:
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