Is "it" the same? If you mean will Perl swollow UTF-8 and handle UTF-8 sequences as single characters in RE's, then yes.

Is there a function in the OS to convert USC-2 or UTF-16 into UTF-8? I don't know.

Will my function work? Only on x86 machines.

However, the reference implementation in the Unicode book is written in portable C and runs on anything.

—John