Another Perl best practice:  Always decode text upon input and encode text upon output—and always to do it explicitly. Don't leave the handling of the character encoding of the text to whatever your version of perl in your environment (locale) defaults to.

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie qw( open close );

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)'; # Or ASCII, Latin-1, etc.

my $file = 'array.txt';

open my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $file;

# ...

close $fh;
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Better…

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie qw( open close );
use open qw( :encoding(UTF-8) :std ); # Or ASCII, Latin-1, etc.

my $file = 'array.txt';

open my $fh, '<', $file;

# ...

close $fh;
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