Ahhh beautiful! I didn't realise they did the job for you. So I have this now:

my $as_str;
open (READIT,"./in.txt");
    $as_str = <READIT>;
close(READIT);

my $json_var = decode_json($as_str);

open (OUT, ">./foo.txt") || die $!;
    print OUT encode_json($json_var);
close (OUT);
[download]

That seems to have done the trick :)

Just out of interest - in NotePad++, if I look at the encoding, I see it as:

Encode in UTF-8 without BOM

I'm a bit confused as to how it has saved it like that, when I didn't specifically tell it to save in UTF8 format?

Cheers

Andy