Little-endian UTF-16 Unicode

Could this be causing my calls to the match operator to work differently than I think they are?

YES!

You'll have to stop using magic diamond( <> ) :/

http://training.perl.com/tcpc/OSCON2011/pue.html # Perl Unicode Essentials

Tutorials: perlunitut: Unicode in Perl

Chicanery Needed to Handle Unicode Text on Microsoft Windows

PerlIO: crlf layer on Windows interfering with UCS-2 unicode

:raw:perlio:encoding(UTF-16le):crlf