Why did you have an open(FILE, "<:encoding(UTF-8)", $file) if your file is in UTF-16?

Your seemingly random trials of various character encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16 (which one? LE?) and UCS-2) let me think that what you really need is to find out what character encoding your file is. The best way is by reading the documentation of the program that created it. Guessing character encodings is bound to fail, especially when there are multiple similar ones.