Thanks for correction and formatting advice; I wrote the post in a hurry but have tidied it a bit today.

This is a list of problems that arose in the real world that, regrettably, I find myself inhabiting; Information comes into my programs from all manner of different places and in some, I can assure you that the open command crashed until I used I first converted the filename viz: my $utf8filename = encode('utf8', $payfile);. Perhaps there was a better way, but sometimes you just need to kill the obscure error expediently.