Perl 5.8+ has UNICODE support integrated so that eq, regular expressions, etc all work without issue.

However, you need to decode the encoded bytes into UNICODE text strings. There are a few ways of doing that:

• Specify the encoding when you open the file from which the text originates.

  open(my $fh, '<:encoding(UTF-8)')
     or die;
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• Specify the encoding for the handle after it's already open.

  binmode(STDIN, ':encoding(UTF-8)');
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• Decode the encoded data manually.

  use Encode qw( decode );
  my $line_bytes = <$fh>;
  my $line_chars = decode('UTF-8', $line_bytes);
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Don't forget that you need to do the inverse — encode the characters into UTF-8 bytes — when you output.

If your source code is UTF-8 encoded, add use utf8; at the top of your file.