I'm guessing that the output text string is actually not ASCII data, but rather is encoded as UTF-16LE -- 2-byte unicode characters, in which all the characters happen to be in the ASCII range (U0000 - U007f), so the second (high) byte is always null. Meanwhile, your display window is (mercifully) interpreting null bytes as spaces (as opposed to doing something really nasty or stupid).

You should look at "Encode" man page (and probably "perlunicode" and even "perluniintro", for a well-rounded education). The thing you need to do is "decode" that text string from UTF-16LE into perl's native utf8. Assuming the string really is just ASCII characters, nothing else should be necessary -- it so happens that ASCII is now a proper subset (a very small subset) of utf8. Supposing you assign the string in question to a scalar, say $comstring, you could convert it for proper display with something like this:

use Encode;

...

my $displayable = decode( 'UTF-16LE', $comstring );

print $displayable;

...
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