There are a series of documentation pages in 5.8.0 that cover this. The best answer I can give you is to start with the main 'man perl' page and go through each of the Unicode documents. Be sure to also visit perlfunc where the utf8 dicipline is applied to a file while opening it. Also visit the binmode() function where the UTF8 mode can be applied to a previously opened file handle. But definately use 5.8.

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