Read the definition of Coded Character Set in the Unicode Consortium's Glossary of Unicode Terms.

Ah ok. So it It means what most people mean by "character set". Adjust to fix accordingly.

your point eludes me.

You said we all made assumptions about the encoding and/or the character set, but I didn't (I stated $ch needed to be text), rethaew didn't (he assumed $string was text) and graff didn't (he's the only one whose solution dealt with the raw input, and he specifically mentioned how to handle encodings).

One has to know if the text is Unicode (CCS) UTF-8 (CEF) or Windows-1252 (both CCS and CEF) or something else.

Just the encoding. All the decoding functions produce characters in the Unicode character set, so you don't have to worry about any other CCS.

open(my $fh, "<:encoding($CEF)", $qfn) or die;
while (<$fh>) {
   print("Line $. contains EM DASH\n") if /\x{2014}/;
}
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