As far as I know from surfing a bit in the site of mysql AB (the company that makes mysql), Mysql still does not support unicode.

so, you have two options:

• You can try to write utf8 and do whatever to fix it when it comes back.
• Use Text::Iconv to send your string to the DB in a supported encoding (usually iso-8859-x works, this includes Latin1) and translate it back to utf when you get it from the DB.

Anyway, I'd like to use this post to add that I hate l10n. That'll be all.