The regexps, per se, don't need any change (I'm assuming Perl 5.8.0, since 5.6.x had some problems). You need to assure two things:

1. that your strings are correctly encoded
2. that Perl knows it

The first is a problem in itself, but a bit off-topic.

The second can be done in two ways:

1. if the strings come from a filehandle, you can use something like open(FH, "<:utf8", "file") to tell Perl to treat data as utf-8 (or use the :encoding layer, see perldoc -f open
2. otherwise (such as your example, from a dirhandle), use Encode; and $string=Encode::decode("utf-8",$string);