use Data::Dumper; use Encode qw(encode); use JSON; use utf8; use open ":std", ":encoding(UTF-8)"; #use open ":std", ":locale"; ## totally didn't do anything for me my $j = qq/{ "Particípio passadő": 1 }/; my $jp = JSON->new->utf8; my $d = $jp->decode(encode("UTF-8", $j)); print "$j\n"; print Dumper($d); print Dumper($j); print Dumper(encode("UTF-8", $j));