Ah - so you need to tell Perl what encoding your source code is in - if you are certain that your source code is UTF-8, the utf8 pragma might help there. You should really check the return value of open by using either autodie or doing the following:

open ...
    or die "Couldn't open '$filename': $!";
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Also, you're using the backslash ("\") as filename separator - I guess that you are on Windows then. See the reply by Anonymous Monk about using Win32::Unicode then.