Hi,
The ‘use utf8’ declares that Perl source file's encoding is UTF-8.
The 0xa0 present in $link_format's definition hex-dumped above is
correct because it's U+00A0 encoded as 0xc2 0xa0. The source has other
non-ASCII characters correctly UTF-8 encoded, e.g. $openquote can
contain ‘«’.
I think the problem lies with whatever takes this scripts output and
puts it into a MIME email message. This could be confirmed by running
the script in the same manner as for the email, but saving the output in
a file to be examined for UTF-8 correctness.
$ printf 'a\xa0b\n' | iconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8
aiconv: illegal input sequence at position 1
$
--
Cheers, Ralph.
