Christoph Moench-Tegeder wrote: > And then it doesn't know that your terminal expects UTF-8 (perl > just dumps the binary string here), because you didn't tell it: > "binmode(STDOUT, ':encoding(utf8)')" would fix that. Or use perl -C, so that it gets that from the environment. From https://perldoc.perl.org/perlrun.html : -C on its own (not followed by any number or option list), or the empty string "" for the PERL_UNICODE environment variable, has the same effect as -CSDL. In other words, the standard I/O handles and the default open() layer are UTF-8-fied but only if the locale environment variables indicate a UTF-8 locale. Now for what the OP is doing, I'd suggest to use Dump() from the Devel::Peek module instead of print. To see the difference between a literal "ä" and "\xc3\xa4" from the point of view of Perl: use Devel::Peek; use utf8; $str = "\xc3\xa4"; Dump($str); $str = "ä"; Dump($str); Result: SV = PV(0x55af63beeda0) at 0x55af63c185d0 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (POK,IsCOW,pPOK) PV = 0x55af63c3c230 "\303\244"\0 CUR = 2 LEN = 10 COW_REFCNT = 1 SV = PV(0x55af63beeda0) at 0x55af63c185d0 REFCNT = 1 FLAGS = (POK,IsCOW,pPOK,UTF8) PV = 0x55af63c58dc0 "\303\244"\0 [UTF8 "\x{e4}"] CUR = 2 LEN = 10 COW_REFCNT = 1 Best regards, -- Daniel Vérité PostgreSQL-powered mailer: http://www.manitou-mail.org Twitter: @DanielVerite