Why did you write one open as "<:utf8", but the other as ">:encoding(utf8)"? I don't see ":encoding" in 3rd edition Camel, but it admits to being incomplete in this regard (p.754).

If there's a null (0x0) before each otherwise normal ASCII character, that sounds more like UTF-16 than UTF-8. See the difference explained in a post on w3.org.

So I would recommend trying ">:utf16", and see if you get what you want. Good Luck!