The best advice I can give about Unicode and UTF-8 in Perl is: don’t worry about it. Just do what you need to do, read up on some basics, and it’ll mostly all work out. When you’re getting odd results, make sure your I/O is UTF-8, and perhaps sprinkle a “use utf8;” at the top of your source files.
And most of the time, this is just fine. Perl … read more.