in reply to Encoding question

Since it seems like this is coming from a file, the fact that it shows up that way in Perl suggests that you're not reading the file in its actual encoding. To do that, simply open the file like so:
open my $fh, '<:encoding(utf16le)', $filename;
Also, since your file seems to have a BOM at the beginning, you may need to do a little
s/^\x{feff}//
on the first line of the file.