I have no experience writing scripts for utf8 but I recently viewed several YAPC 2016 youtube videos on the subject and they are very interesting and should answer your question. Ricardo Signes is one of the leading perl unicode experts and his talks are very good and humorous.

Here is one of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmTeXcEixE.

In reply to Re: Read and write UTF-8 by fishmonger
in thread Read and write UTF-8 by Norah

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