The example code works fine using my Perl release:
This is perl, v5.8.5 built for i386-linux-thread-multi

However tricky character set conversions can take place as you download/cut/past program code from the web.
To rule this out you may want to edit the program to first remove and then type in the special characters locally, see if that helps.

Or try to change '..' to a comma in the list assignment in your original program.