Yes, I do mean use utf8; although my code file has no BOM, it still seems to work.

Byte order is immutable with UTF-8, so the BOM is useless as a BOM with UTF-8. Some applications use it as a signal that the file is encoded using UTF-8, but Perl uses use utf8; for that.

I'll report the results with code samples

By the way, I added an example to my earlier post.

If you're having problems, please use Devel::Peek and provide us a Dump of the string that's giving you problems.