What ikegami is saying is that the data you get from your database is indeed utf8 data, but perl is unaware that this is the case, and its default behavior is to treat it as bytes (which end up, in your situation, as single-byte Latin-1 characters). So... 
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";

my $u = __t("Patient Id");
utf8::decode( $u );
print $u,"\n";

[download]
Please check the utf8 manual for more details. In some situations, it might be preferable to use the Encode module: 
use Encode;
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";

my $u = decode( "utf8", __t("Patient Id"));
print $u;

[download]
(updated to use "$u" instead of "$a" -- lexical instances of perl globals can lead to confusion and anxiety...)

In reply to Re: Do I have a unicode problem, or is this something else? by graff
in thread Do I have a unicode problem, or is this something else? by Steve_BZ

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