I can't explain the behaviour you are observing, but I want to comment on a few things nonetheless:

I usually discourage people from using encoding, because it has many known problems - one of which is related to formats. Also to quote the documentation:

At any rate, the very use of format is questionable when it comes to unicode characters since you have to consider such things as character width (i.e. double-width for ideographs) and directions (i.e. BIDI for Arabic and Hebrew).

Instead I write my scripts in UTF-8, and use the utf8 and open pragmas.

In reply to Re: Strange unicode behaviour with UTF8 encoding and format by moritz
in thread Strange unicode behaviour with UTF8 encoding and format by mje

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