There are plenty of places where things could go wrong. I don't know what your environment is, so I don't know exactly what you are parsing (ie in which encoding it is, what you locale setting is (UTF8 or not?), which version of perl you are using (I don't think a DATA section in utf8 would work before 5.8.1, try parsing the data from a file).

For the record I had no problem running the code in your original question, so there is nothing wrong with it.