Not a solution, but quoth perldiag: 

       panic: utf16_to_utf8: odd bytelen
           (P) Something tried to call utf16_to_utf8 with an odd (as opposed
           to even) byte length.

So somehow you've got Perl thinking your text is UTF16 encoded (two octets per character) but it's got an odd number of bytes to work with (5 in this case). Perhaps your editor's inserting a specious BOM or something that's confuzzling Perl? (Disclaimer: I don't really have any experience with non-ASCII encodings, so take that for what it is (a literal reading of the error message text))

In reply to Re: panic error message by Fletch
in thread panic error message by spring

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