Depends on your editor, I'm pretty sure there are options to get a code translated. °

I also saw Perl allowing named unicodes to be expanded. *

> a total of about 20 multibyte characters

And the third option are defining your own 20 Readonly constants and using variable interpolation of $widechar variables.

*) See perlunicode#Unicode-Encodings -> \N{notation}

°) Like here

G'day YenForYang,

Given you wrote "... I realize that the impact is going to be miniscule.", you should not allow it to affect your choices. Bear in mind that the utf8 pragma is lexically scoped: you could write your code such that it only affects a small portion of it; that portion could be just compile time code (see further down for examples).

I would be more concerned with readability and maintainability. You haven't provided any information on what characters you'll be using nor who'll be reading the code; as a result, what follows are just general thoughts and ideas.

Putting the actual character, its hexadecimal value, or its official Unicode name in code is often not helpful; for instance, seeing any of these in source code would not be immediately meaningful to me:

• 對
• \x{5c0d}
• \N{CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5C0D}

$ perl -C -E 'use utf8; my @x = ("對", "\x{5c0d}", "\N{CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5C0D}"); say for @x'
對
對
對

As you're only dealing with a small number, perhaps use constants with meaningful names:

{
    use utf8;
    use constant {
        SOME_MEANINGFUL_NAME  => "\N{...}",
        OTHER_MEANINGFUL_NAME => "\N{...}",
        ...
    };
}
[download]

$ perl -C -E '{use utf8; use constant { X => "λ", Y => "Д" }; } say X'
λ
$ perl -C -E '{use utf8; use constant { X => "λ", Y => "Д" }; } say X; say "對"'
λ
å°
$ perl -C -E '{use utf8; use constant { X => "λ", Y => "Д" }; } say X; use utf8; say "對"'
λ
對

You mentioned that you thought the hex sequence was "tedious to lookup". Let Perl do it for you. Write a small script for yourself, the guts of which might look something like this:

$ perl -E 'use utf8; printf "%x\n", ord "對"'
5c0d

And, if you want the official Unicode name, Perl can do that for you too. Here's an example:

perl -E 'use utf8; use Unicode::UCD "charinfo"; say charinfo(ord "對")->{name}'
CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-5C0D

Unicode::UCD is a core module. It can provide a lot more information about characters than just the name. UCD stands for "Unicode Character Database".

If you really must decide on the basis of performance, then the readable option wins in this case anyhow, because it gives the compiler the actual bytes it needs instead of an escape sequence which then needs to be converted into the actual bytes. Doing the conversion takes non-zero time, therefore not needing to convert will take less time. Post-compilation, the executed code will contain the actual bytes either way, so there will be no difference when the code is executed (unless you're inside a string eval or something like that which forces the escape sequence to be processed repeatedly).

But, although the conversion takes non-zero time, the time required is very near-zero. Even if your script is run millions of times, the aggregate difference in run time across all those runs will be less than the time it takes me to type this word. There's a good reason why people are so against micro-optimization - in the vast majority of cases, the time you spend to design and implement the optimization is orders of magnitude larger than the time saved when executing it.

does use utf8 affect script performance more than hex escape sequences (at the lowest possible level)?

Not at all unless you have string literals with characters in 80..FF. These will get stored in the upgraded (UTF8=1) format with use utf8;.