I think I should mention that Juerd contributed a Perl Unicode FAQ (perlunifaq) to bleadperl. It probably deserves a wider audience than the little P5P circle.
(Of course, comments welcome. Send them to P5P.)
He he. Sorry about that one. It's my fault.Some database drivers for DBI can also automatically encode and decode, but that is typically limited to the UTF-8 encoding, because they cheat.