Question is wheater is worth investing the effort making it Unicode-ready.

Do you want to use it? Do you have a minute? Then its worth the effort

As far as i can see, all you do is change

# open file and read its contents
open(OPT, $arrayRef->[$i]);
[download]

so it specifies encoding somehow ... maybe '<:via(File::BOM)' or some such

Then the real work of writing tests that check this works and doesn't break...

perlunitut: Unicode in Perl