I have in a ANSI file perl script the following code.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Encode;

sub UnicodeDecHashNumsToText($)
{
    use open qw/:std :encoding(UTF-8)/; # Tell perl standard output etc. use utf-8

    my( $lText ) = @_;
    print "Orig Text = '$lText'n";
    $lText =~ s/^#(d+)/chr($1)/e; # e treats the replacement as code, not text
    print "Returning: (".length($lText).")'$lText'n";
    return $lText;
}

# Comparing
# The 'got' value is obtained reading a normal file.
my $got = UnicodeDecHashNumsToText( "#8364" );

# The 'expected' value is read through a select statement 
# from a database in locale: en_US.819
my $expected = "€"; 

print "'$got' vs  '$expected' n"; 
if( $got  ne $expected ) { print "FAILEDn"; } else { print "SUCCESSn"; }

Output:

Orig Text = '#8364'
Returning: (1)'€'
'€' vs  ''
FAILED

The compare fails.
What changes or additions needs to be done for the compare to be ok?

Please help, many thanks in advance.