That's right. You only need (and should only use) use utf8; if the source code of your script is in UTF-8, e.g. variable names, text within the script file, etc.

For reading in a file that is UTF-8, use an IO layer. See binmode, the docs for which say:

To mark FILEHANDLE as UTF-8, use :utf8 or :encoding(UTF-8) . :utf8 jus
+t marks the data as UTF-8 without further checking, while :encoding(U
+TF-8) checks the data for actually being valid UTF-8. More details ca
+n be found in PerlIO::encoding.
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