I've had problems with making DBI calls to a SQL 2005 DB with UTF8 params. I'm on Windows. After some troubleshooting, I found that the strings seemed to be encoded correctly throughout the whole call chain, from the Ajax call to my script and back to the browser. The only place that had issues was the DB, and I couldn't figure out why. I had a friend suggest that I get a hash of the search params before and after the utf8 calls I was making, since it's difficult to tell if my strings are encoded right or if its the viewer fixing things for me. So here's where it gets weird: taking the hash fixes my issues, DB calls work and all is well. This doesn't work: 
my $search = $cgi->param("query").'%';
utf8::decode($search);
# database calls here...

[download]
But this does: 
my $search = $cgi->param("query").'%';
use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);
utf8::decode($search);
md5_hex($search);
# database calls here...

[download]
And switching to Digest::Perl::MD5 doesn't work. Could it have something to do with passing to XS? Is there a Better Way to do this?

In reply to UTF spooky action by wes

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