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;
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Also, since your file seems to have a BOM at the beginning, you may need to do a little

s/^\x{feff}//
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on the first line of the file.