Well, the database was lying to Perl, perhaps. But I'm not sure the author's diagnosis is correct. The mangled text has only one "?", Which means that whatever

Well, the database was lying to Perl, perhaps. But I'm not sure the author's diagnosis is correct. The mangled text has only one "?", Which means that whatever software did the mangling knew that two-byte sequence represented a single character. Maybe whatever was reading from the database was(I'm assuming MySQL since 1990s vintage) using a non-Unicode-capable connection?