Judging by your output, your problem is that your string (source code) is UTF-8 encoded, but you have not told Perl about it.

use utf8 if your source code is in UTF-8.  In case the data comes from elsewhere, decode it properly before using it.

The UTF-8 encoding of the character 'à' (for example) is the two bytes c3 a0, so if you don't tell Perl that those two bytes are supposed to be decoded into one character, you'll have them incorrectly interpreted as the two latin-1 characters \xc3 and \xa0.

In reply to Re^3: What Voodoo Encoding does RTF use for > ASCII Chars? by Eliya
in thread What Voodoo Encoding does RTF use for > ASCII Chars? by tosh

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.