I should be able to solve this myself, but so far I haven't come up with any wiley approaches nor any magic combinations of keywords at Google:

How can I coerce Perl's \b pattern to recognize and respect accented characters?

my $land = 'Mexico';
my @words = split(/\b/,$land);
[download]

This does what you'd expect, and scalar(@words)==1. However, if you change the 'e' in Mexico to an accented e (México), then it splits before and after the accented 'e', and scalar(@words)==3.

use utf8; works as long as the literal appears in the text; reading in the text from outside the code doesn't work. E.g.,

$ perl -Mutf8 -e "print join(q{,},split(/\b/,\$ARGV[0])),qq{\n}" méxic
+o
m,é,xico

$ perl -Mutf8 -e "print join(q{,},split(/\b/,q{méxico})),qq{\n}"
Wide character in print at -e line 1.
méxico
[download]

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