To follow up on the Anonymous Monk's reply (which is basically correct), you need to come up with the correct way to have a GB-encoded string assigned to a scalar variable, so that you can pass this to the "gb_to_simp()" function.

For that matter, since you have your string in utf8 already, you don't need to use "gb-to_simp()" (or Encode) at all.

And the point about the BOM, as explained in the first reply, is that perl won't print one automatically -- if you want it in the output, include it in the print statement.