According to the unicode website, this means that the accent (or diacritical mark) is applied to the preceding character. Well, nice, you'd say. But the problem is: it doesn't. Every Combining Diacritical Mark is displayed as a 0.

Perl is, asuming you're using 5.8.x, correctly outputting pairs of Unicode characters (such as an 'A' followed by a \x{300}); how and whether the combining takes place is the job of whatever display device you are using (such as a unicode-enabled terminal).

Dave.