Thank you Tanktalus - my first visit to the monastery has been very successful. I should have realized the problem having used the Encode module before. I do still see one (easily avoidable) issue in that contrary to the description in http://perldoc.perl.org/Encode.html decode_utf8(string) is not working as a synonym (in this case) for decode('utf8',string). I am using perl, v5.8.5 built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi - could this be an implementation problem? This is shown in the snippet below.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Encode;
sub ToUpper {
  return<<END;
0061\t0063\t0041
END
}
# Below fails
my $tim = decode_utf8("abcdef");
# But this one works
#my $tim = decode('utf8',"abcdef");
print uc($tim),"\n";
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I will respond to the other questions separately.