Cross posting on Stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28709936/perl-error-related-to-encode-pm

I have the following software:

Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS

    $ uname -a
    Linux XXX 3.13.0-45-generic #74-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 13 19:36:28 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


Perl 5.18:

    $ perl -version

    This is perl 5, version 18, subversion 2 (v5.18.2) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
    (with 41 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

and Encode.pm 2.49:

    $ head -n 10 /usr/lib/perl/5.18/Encode.pm
    #
    # $Id: Encode.pm,v 2.49 2013/03/05 03:13:47 dankogai Exp dankogai $


When I use [ikiwiki](https://packages.debian.org/experimental/ikiwiki), which is a package using Encode.pm, I got the following error:

    $ ikiwiki --setup ~/wiki.setup
    Cannot decode string with wide characters at /usr/lib/perl/5.18/Encode.pm line 176.

Lines 166 - 180 of Encode.pm reads:

    sub decode($$;$) {
        my ( $name, $octets, $check ) = @_;
        return undef unless defined $octets;
        $octets .= '';
        $check ||= 0;
        my $enc = find_encoding($name);
        unless ( defined $enc ) {
            require Carp;
            Carp::croak("Unknown encoding '$name'");
        }
        my $string = $enc->decode( $octets, $check );
        $_[1] = $octets if $check and !ref $check and !( $check & LEAVE_SRC() );
        return $string;
    }

Does any kind soul have idea how to fix this issue?