The code works for me without either the "use utf8" or "use encoding 'utf8'" statements. It works in 5.8.9, 5.10.1 and 5.12.1 (all three are installed on this system independent of each other).

A look at the doc page (perldoc utf8) shows the following:

Do not use this pragma for anything else than telling Perl that your script is written in UTF-8. The utility functions described below are directly usable without "use utf8;".
When UTF-8 becomes the standard source format, this pragma will effectively become a no-op.
The following functions are defined in the "utf8::" package by the Perl core. You do not need to say "use utf8" to use these and in fact you should not say that unless you really want to have UTF-8 source code.
So, try it without either "use" statement and see if the behaviour changes (for better or worse ;-)).

Also, I noted (belatedly) that a rollback is to v5.6. This snip from the doc's may explain:

While some limited functionality towards this does exist as of Perl 5.8.0, that is more accidental than designed; use of Unicode for the said purposes is unsupported.

In reply to Re: Odd problems with UTF-8, regexps, and newer Perl versions by proceng
in thread Odd problems with UTF-8, regexps, and newer Perl versions by ablegrape

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