It is has not been replaced by nothing. What has been taken away, without replacement, is the feature to write use encoding 'ISO-8859-5'; and then use cyrillic characters in that encoding in character literals of your source code. But you didn't do that, you declared UTF-8, and there is a replacement for that: There is use utf8; which is the equivalent of use encoding 'utf8';

Note that (precisely: Since Perl 5.8.2) neither of those affects how your program reads and writes text: They are used to declare that your source code is encoded as UTF-8. So it mostly affects string literals in your code, but not templates or anything else your program reads or prints to.

If you want to set a default encoding, have a look at open. If you write use open ':encoding(UTF-8)'; then every calls to open within the lexical scope of the open pragma will be UTF-8 encoded.

Not at all. There's surely a nice way of doing of fixing the bug that you fixed by relying on another bug (i.e. by using use encoding). But you didn't give us any information about the problem. So refPrint doesn't return the right output. And?