See tchrist's OSCON Perl Unicode Slides and his html slideshow ( Use arrow keys to advance/retreat the slideshow). In there is the definitive way

tchrist suggests all scripts dealing with Unicode start like this( from his slideshow): Its simple isn't it? heh heh:-)

#!/usr/bin/env perl
 use v5.14;
 use utf8;
 use strict;
 use autodie;
 use warnings; 
 use warnings    qw< FATAL utf8 >;
 use open        qw< :std :encoding(UTF-8) >;
 use charnames   qw< :full >;
 use feature     qw< unicode_strings >; 

#The First of these is almost always needed; the rest, not so much.
 use Unicode::Normalize  qw< NFD NFC >;
 use Encode              qw< encode decode >;
 use Carp                qw< carp croak confess cluck >;
 use File::Basename      qw< basename >;

 $0 = basename($0);  # shorter messages 

binmode(DATA, ":encoding(UTF-8)");
 
 # This works like perl -CA: note that it
 # assumes your terminal is set to use UTF-8
 if (grep /\P{ASCII}/ => @ARGV) { 
    @ARGV = map { decode("UTF-8", $_) } @ARGV;
 }
 
 $| = 1;   # comment out for performance
 END { close STDOUT } 

#This avoids compile-time “bugs” in the pragma:
# XXX: use warnings FATAL => "all";
 
 local $SIG{__DIE__} = sub {
     confess "Uncaught exception: @_" unless $^S;
 };
 
 local $SIG{__WARN__} = sub {
     if ($^S) { cluck   "Trapped warning: @_" } 
     else     { confess "Deadly warning: @_"  }
 }; 

# I use this on normal CLI filters:
 if (@ARGV == 0 && -t STDIN && -t STDERR) {
    print STDERR "$0: reading input from tty, type ^D for EOF...\n";
 }

 while (<>)  {
     chomp;
     $_ = NFD($_);
     ...
 } continue {
     say NFC($_);
 }
 
__END__
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