Please note that you have an asymmetry in your code: You want to encode output, but don't decode input. This is why things go all wrong, and you see Mojibake in your output.

So, whenever you read something form STDIN, also do 

binmode STDIN, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

# then you can do:
while (<STDIN>) { 
   # work with $_ here
}

[download]

This decodes the input. Then use utf8; to tell perl that your script is written in UTF-8 (note that ASCII is a valid subset of UTF-8).

Test that your terminal actually understands UTF-8, as described in this article, which also might be of general interest for you.

SpreadSheet::WriteExcel works correctly if you supply it with decoded text strings.

Update: clarified what I mean with the while-loop.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to Re: UTF-8 issues with Perl in general and with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel by moritz
in thread UTF-8 issues with Perl in general and with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel by elef

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