I've never dealt with Unicode so i can't help you there, but if you're looking to slurp a file into an array or scalar (something considered bad by most people, which i do a lot of ) why are you not using local?

my $var = '';
# or perhaps   my @var = ();
   { local $/ = undef;
     open(FH,"<myfilepath/andname") or die "A horrible death $!";
     $var = <FH> ;
     close(FH);
   }
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Does unicode somehow thwart an undef'ed input record seperator ( $/ )?