There may be a shortcut :) You can save the source file with UTF-8 Encoding (Notepad in Win XP can do this) and then load utf8: 
use utf8;
print ucfirst "äbcdef";

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And if you can save the source file with a BOM (I'm not sure about Notepad, but Komodo can do this) I think that utf8 pragma will became useless and any unicode character can be used without any extra effort (with Perl 5.8+)

In reply to Re^2: ucfirst doesn't work if first character of word a special finnish character by Burak
in thread ucfirst doesn't work if first character of word a special finnish character by asfar

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