Thanks for the clarification of U8. I realize that I need XS or Inline::C to use API functions but are there perl functions that wrap any of the UTF8 stuff? The utf8 pragma doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for. There are a couple of modules on CPAN but what I'd really like to do is make sure a given string is utf8 inside the perl part of my module and fix it if it isn't (this can be a bit of a pain in c) and then do the lower level manipulation I need to do (using some c-only libraries) using Inline::C.

This brings me to another question: Say a perl variable holds data encoded in utf8, if I pass that variable to a c function and SvPV the SV* will the c-style string I get back be utf8?