Perl 5 introduced Unicode support in 5.6.0 (2000) but it was kind of a mess. It was essentially redesigned in 5.8.0 (2002). At that point it was fairly buggy, b

Perl 5 introduced Unicode support in 5.6.0 (2000) but it was kind of a mess. It was essentially redesigned in 5.8.0 (2002). At that point it was fairly buggy, but by 5.8.8 (2006) it was in pretty good shape. The most recent versions of Perl 5 (5.22.1 was released a few days ago) have excellent Unicode support. That said, Perl 5 does not have different types for strings and bytes, which is definitely a source of bugs. Since Unicode support is essentially opt-in for a library (you have to explicitly decode/encode data somehow) it's easily possible for a library you use to break your data. Most of the major libraries (database, HTTP, etc.) have long since been patched to respect Unicode in appropriate ways, so the state of Unicode in Perl 5 is good overall.