First of all, writing a string of characters to a file without first encoding makes assumptions about Perl's internal format and can earn you some warnings. That means 

write_to_file('>', '_decoded', $string);

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is wrong. There are two ways of encoding a string. 

write_to_file('>',      '_explicit_utf8', encode_utf8($string));
write_to_file('>:utf8', '_implicit_utf8', $string);

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The problem you are having is that you are encoding it using encode_utf8 and then again using :utf8.

In reply to Re: Writing unicode characters to file using open($fh, ">:utf8, $name) mangles unicode? by ikegami
in thread Writing unicode characters to file using open($fh, ">:utf8, $name) mangles unicode? by telcontar

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