choroba, It confuses me why when I use make_hash, it returns the correct strings as keys and values without having to specify an encoding; but when I go to get the first character with either the first_alpha subroutine or substr, I suddenly need to specify the encoding. All of these subroutines are in the same module where encoding is not specified anywhere. Some subroutines return the correct strings without having to specify encoding while others do not is confusing.

If this helps, I am including my locale.

me@office:~$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
[download]

As an aside, I rewrote first_alpha. The original horrified me. I hope the rewrite is cleaner.

sub first_alpha {
  my $alpha = shift;
  $alpha = ucfirst($alpha) if $alpha =~ /^\l./;
  $alpha =~ s/\s*\b(A|a|An|an|The|the)(_|\s)//xi;
  if ($alpha =~ /^\d/) {
    $alpha = '#';
  }
  elsif ($alpha !~ /^\p{uppercase}/) {
    $alpha = '!';
  }
  else {
    $alpha =~ s/^(.)(\w|\W)+/$1/;
  }
  return $alpha;
}
[download]

sub first_alpha {
  my $string = shift;
  $string =~ s/\s*\b(A|a|An|an|The|the)(_|\s)//xi;

  my $alpha = uc substr($string, 0, 1);
  if ($alpha =~ /^\d/) {
    $alpha = '#';
  }
  elsif ($alpha !~ /^\p{uppercase}/) {
    $alpha = '!';
  }
  return $alpha;
}
[download]