Programming Perl, 4th Edition

utf8

use utf8;

The utf8 pragma declares that the Perl source for the rest of the lexical scope is encoded as UTF-8. This lets you use Unicode string literals and identifiers.

use utf8;
my $résumé_name = "Björk Guðmundsdóttir";
{
    no utf8;
    my $mojibake = '';  # probably erroneous
}

There are other features that the utf8 provides, but they are deprecated in favor of the Encode module.

Note that as of v5.14, the compiler does not normalize identifiers, so you can’t tell the difference between different ways to form the same glyphs (using composed or decomposed characters). See Chapter 6 for details on normalization. We recommend that you normalize all of your Perl identifiers into NFC (or NFKC) to avoid situations where you have two different variables that look the same.