in reply to Mysterious Whitespaces between each character in a file

The file is encoded using UCS-2le
open(my $fh, '<:encoding(UCS2-le)', $fn)

You'll need 5.8 or higher for the above command. Perl 5.6 didn't support Unicode and encodings well. Keep in mind that 5.6.1 is 8.5 years old, 5.8 is no longer maintained and 5.10.1 is out. Sorry, I can't help you with a 5.6 solution.

Update: Added last paragraph