utf8 output with 5.8

axelrose has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear Monks,

I just stumbled other a difference between 5.6 and 5.8.
My goal is to output utf8 characters, e.g. using "ö"
<U00F6> LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIARESIS

with 5.6 I get:

perl -e '$c="f6"; $u=pack("U",hex($c)); print $u, "\x{f6}"' | od -tx1
0000000 c3 b6 c3 b6
0000004
[download]

With 5.8 the output is not the "c3 b6" two byte code for each "ö" but the single byte "f6".

What's the equivalent in 5.8? (sorry, I cannot test myself in the moment)

Thanks for your help, Axel.

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