Adding to Your Mother's excellent advice above, you'll love the predefined unicode character classes for the various scripts. Here's a minor enhancement to the script provided above (again, using "pre" tags to avoid the mangling of non-ascii characters): 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use utf8;
use strictures;
use HTML::Entities "encode_entities_numeric";

binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
# OR use Encode, print encode_utf8(...)

while (<DATA>)
{
    chomp;
    next unless /\w/;
    my $script_label = "";
    for my $script ( qw/Arabic Greek Hebrew/ ) {
        $script_label .= " has $script" if ( /\p{$script}/ );
    }
    print $_, $/;
    print "  -> ",  length, " characters long; $script_label", $/;
    print "  -> ", encode_entities_numeric($_), $/;
}

__DATA__
antennæ
עברית
Ελληνικά
العَرَبِية
The output I got from that was: 
antennæ
  -> 7 characters long; 
  -> antennæ
עברית
  -> 5 characters long;  has Hebrew
  -> עברית
Ελληνικά
  -> 8 characters long;  has Greek
  -> Ελληνικά
العَرَبِية
  -> 10 characters long;  has Arabic
  -> العَرَبِية
To put that another way, you can match and store strings of characters in particular, language-specific scripts with something like this: 
# Assuming $_ contains the input:

my @hebrew_parts = /\p{Hebrew}+/g;
my @arabic_parts = /\p{Arabic}+/g;
my @greek_parts = /\p{Greek}+/g;

[download]
Similarly for Han, Cyrillic, Ethiopic, Thai, Devanagari, etc. (As shown above, you have the option of parameterizing the script label as a loop variable.)

In reply to Re: Unicode words match and catch by graff
in thread Unicode words match and catch by kepler

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