Re^4: Special character not being captured

[vr]

right, UTF-8 input wasn't decoded, string of octets passed to first_alpha, 1st octet i.e. \xC3 was returned and should have become hash key, but somehow it is Replacement Character. But then, dump as shown (hash of arrays) can not be alpha_hash output, so it's not really SSCE, can only guess.

[choroba]

It might be the terminal who changes the character into the replacement one:

$ perl -wE '%h = ("\xc3" => 1); say $_, ord for keys %h'

�195