Anonymous Monk:

It's kind of hard to point to the difference from here: The strings you posted could have been encoded/decoded in various places between getting into your text editor and getting into the PerlMonks site. It could be that your local code page¹ supports the first string but not the second (forcing it to UTF-8).

As a native ASCIIan, I tend to find Unicode frustrating. Not because it's frustrating in and of itself, but because with enough systems to go through, there's frequently a monkey in the middle causing difficulty.

It's the same experience I had with XML--too many programmers² think you can create XML simply by doing a little string manipulation to wrap some stuff in tags and/or quotes. Then they insist that their "XML" file is valid, even when it violates *dozens* of rules laid out in the standard, and multiple XML validators insist that it isn't valid.

Notes:

1 Assuming you're running Windows.

2 At least some 10+ years ago when I had to deal extensively with XML. The situation may suck less nowadays.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.