Thanks for reply. I will read perlunitut and found sites that explains unicode in perl precisely when googled with "ef bf bd". I am printing now...

When the characer comes from outside of perl, We have to decode the bytes to perl's internal utf8, as perlunitut says. Especially when you want to know the length of characer. For example, cgi's param() will return bytes and when I want to know the length of the word, I decode it.

My question in short, here comes two character '00E9' and '3041'. They must be two character in utf8. How do you substring the second character and print it?

I agree my example clumsy. Is this clear? I guess this is OP's problem.