Actually, using Unicode::String as a container for your data is not needed (in fact, it will croak on acctented chars and other punctuation). Just use the string as you 'normally' do, i.e. to look at each char:

    for my $uchar (split(//, $text)) {
        my $ord = ord($uchar);
        ...
    }
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While it seems natural to me now, it took me some time to locate that my troubles with unicode strings was *using* Unicode::String... :-)

---Lars