> I am convinced that you already know "enough to be dangerous", but not enough to arrive at the correctly modelled solution that most other Perl programmers would implement.
I have to agree on that. The last time I extensively programmed something fully by myself and in Perl - in was one week before the capitulation in the Browser War, November 1998. I am actually surprised by myself to be able to write a working program in 2 days - 20 years after. It is amazing how much stuff can be kept at the backdoor of the mind... I'm fully fluent in Javascript though.
I'll do break the code into minimum test cases to check all spelled advises and corrections.
It is rather offtop for the initial question "Is there some universal Unicode+UTF8 switch?" - but if it's ok to continue in the same thread then I will continue here.

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