That may also be why your perl has issues as well. UTF8 characters encode all of Unicode 1,112,064 characters, so a UTF8 character may be 8, 16, 24, or 32 bits.

To fix perl will require the understanding of wide characters, a locale based "datatype", sort of. Help is here:
Perl Programming/Unicode UTF-8 - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Recent linux awk version 4.2 onward splits UTF8 encoded records into fields using wide characters, -a forces the split to be created and placed in the $F array. Here is a perl sample and an awk sample that do the same thing on UTF8 files.

Code:

perl -CSD -aF'\N{U+1f4a9}' -nle 'print $F[0]' somefile.txt  # $F[0] is the same as awk's $1 variable

awk -F$'\U0001f4a9' '{print $1}' somefile.txt  # or $'\u007c' for 4-digit code points

code point is a delimiter. All of this is explained in the link.