I only a few years ago started writing programs with Russian text IO in mind. Before that, I've just been saving perl program's files in utf8, thinking, that it makes my programs unicode enabled, as read in different places about it. I've had to start including those unicode and locale settings, after I've noticed that Russian text is scrambled on the output, but I am pretty vague about utf8 in perl, because, there is so much I have and want to learn in perl other, then unicode, but, when I look in unicode/utf8 family of perl documentation, there is so much to read (which I've done more deeply in the last few months, but in comparison of how much is left to read on that subject, it's almost nothing), that I always prefer reading on other subjects in perl, than unicode. I read more about unicode, when encounter some problem. I have a perl version 5.14 installed on my comp. I've recently installed new servers, ran my programs on them and noticed that there are warnings about deprecated encoding. The servers have perl 5.18 installed. I was thinking about updating my code, since those unicode settings were added to all of my libraries. Didn't do it yet, because of other deadlines that I have to meet. I will try your suggestion and see what it will do to me.