in reply to two byte chars in code

Are you sure you're using ord? Looks to me like you're using oct :)
perldoc -f ord
    ord EXPR
    ord     Returns the numeric (ASCII or Unicode) value of the first
            character of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, uses "$_". For the
            reverse, see the chr entry elsewhere in this document. See the
            utf8 manpage for more about Unicode.

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
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