in reply to CRLF not encoding into UTF-16LE correctly on ActivePerl 5.8.8

You're experiencing problems since the ordering of :crlf and :encoding is backwards. See PerlIO: crlf layer on Windows interfering with UCS-2 unicode. You want to use the following in your open: 

# With LF<->CRLF conversion
:raw:perlio:encoding(utf-16le):crlf

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or 
# Without LF<->CRLF conversion
:raw:perlio:encoding(utf-16le)

[download]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom