You seem to have a slight misunderstanding about Unicode and UTF. As I understand it, Unicode is basically a big table of characters (or something like characters). Each character is assigned a number. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are character encodings. They describe what number a certain set of bits represents. UTF-* is used to encode Unicode characters, but Unicode itself is not an encoding. As to your question, I am not sure how Perl handles other encodings besides UTF-8. Hopefully some other monk will explain it (or perhaps even explain where I might be misunderstanding things. This has been known to happen on occasion.)