What can Perl 5.8 do with a UTF-8 string?
The Unicode support in Perl 5.6 had a number of omissions and bugs. Many of the shortcomings were fixed in Perl 5.8 and 5.8.1. One major leap forward in 5.8 was the move to Perl IO and ‘layers’ which allows translations to take place transparently as file handles are read from or written to. A built-in layer called ‘:encoding’ will automatically translate data to UTF-8 as it is read, or to some other encoding as it is written.
