It seems you meant the response to the "How Do I Know Whether My String Is In Unicode?" question, right? Well I don't care whether Perl thinks the string is unicode (I know it does not), I want to know whether the string of bytes is "could be" UTF-8. Anyway the later answers seem to be what I need. I did try the pack() solution and it seems to be working fine.

I'll try several ways suggested in that manpage and by other responders and come back with some benchmarks :-)

Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature