I ran into an issue where the parser was generating a "Wide character in print" warning. A Google search revealed that this is usually caused by unicode being handled improperly.

"Wide character in print" means you are trying to store a string of characters without converting them to bytes first. Files can only contain bytes.

Is the > prior to Item Summary no longer telling perl to create a new file to write too?

open(my $fh, "> $file")         Old style
open(my $fh, '>', $file)        Better 5.6 style
open(my $fh, '>:utf8', $file)   Better 5.6 style with auto encoding
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Always check the result of open for errors. You'll catch 99% of I/O errors.