Perl + Unicode: "Wide Strings" error - perl

Question

I am running Active Perl 5.14 on Windows 7.
I am trying to write a program that will read-in a conversion table, then work on a file and replace certain patterns by other patterns - all of the above in Unicode (UTF-8). Here is the beginning of the program:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# Load a conversion table from CONVTABLE to %ConvTable.
# Then find matches in a file and convert them.
use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;
use 5.014;
use utf8;
use autodie;
use warnings qw< FATAL utf8 >;
use open qw< :std :utf8 >;
use charnames qw< :full >;
use feature qw< unicode_strings >;
my ($i,$j,$InputFile, $OutputFile,$word,$from,$to,$linetoprint);
my (#line, #lineout);
my %ConvTable; # Conversion hash
print 'Conversion table: opening file: E:\My Documents\Perl\Conversion table.txt'."\n";
my $sta= open (CONVTABLE, "<:encoding(utf8)", 'E:\My Documents\Perl\Conversion table.txt');
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8'; # output should be in UTF-8
# Load conversion hash
while (<CONVTABLE>) {
chomp;
print "$_\n"; # etc ...
# etc ...
It turns out that at this point, it says:
wide character in print at (eval 155)E:/Active Perl/lib/Perl5DB.pl:640]line 2, <CONVTABLE> line 1, etc...
Why is that? I think I've gone through and implemented all the necessary prescriptions for correct handling of Unicode strings, decoding and encoding into UTF-8?
And how to fix it?
TIA
Helen

Answer 1

The Perl debugger has its own output handle that is distinct from STDOUT (although it may ultimately go to the same place as STDOUT). You'll also want to do something like this near the beginning of your script:
binmode $DB::OUT, ':utf8' if $DB::OUT;

Answer 2

I suspect that the problem is in some part of the code that you haven't shown us. I base this suspicion on the following facts:
The error message you quote says at (eval 155). There are no evals in your code.
The code you have shown us above does not produce a "wide character" warning when I run it, even if the input contains Unicode characters. The only way I can make it produce one is to comment out both the use open line and the binmode STDOUT line.
Admittedly, my testing environment is not exactly identical to yours: I'm on Linux, and my Perl is only v5.10.1, meaning that I had to lower the version requirement and turn off the unicode_strings feature (not that you're actually using it). Still, I very much suspect that the problem is not in the code you've posted.