Oh ye who are wise and enlightened, I am doing several regex matches using Spanish text as read from a configuration file and keep getting this message: 
Malformed UTF-8 character (unexpected non-continuation byte 0x00, imme
+diately after start byte 0xc3) in pattern match (m//) at /Users/spiro
+s/.... line 90, <$fh> line 5.

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The actual code that does the regex is : 
return $n if ( $token =~ m/^$term/i );

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I took some extra steps and in order to make sure all the strings I used where in UTF-8, i used Devel::Peek. Indeed all the SV's have the UTF-8 flag on: 
SV = PVMG(0x1c6c2a0) at 0x1ab6a28
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0x2dd2d80 "alto"\0 [UTF8 "alto"]
  CUR = 4
  LEN = 15
  MAGIC = 0x2dd30b0
    MG_VIRTUAL = &PL_vtbl_utf8
    MG_TYPE = PERL_MAGIC_utf8(w)
    MG_LEN = 4

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etc. Right before the warning, this was the output from Devel::Peek for that particular SV: 
SV = PVMG(0x1c6c2a0) at 0x1ab6a28
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (PADBUSY,PADMY,POK,pPOK,UTF8)
  IV = 0
  NV = 0
  PV = 0x2dd2d80 "ba\303\261o"\0 [UTF8 "ba\x{f1}o"]
  CUR = 5
  LEN = 15
  MAGIC = 0x2dd30b0
    MG_VIRTUAL = &PL_vtbl_utf8
    MG_TYPE = PERL_MAGIC_utf8(w)
    MG_LEN = 4

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Some reading here and there revealed that this happens when a string contains 'wide characters' as in, character sequences thus regex wont work. I am truly, madly, deeply stuck here and this is making me ANGRY and SCARED. Your help would be much appreciated.

In reply to Malformed UTF-8 by spiros

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