Although Perl 5.6.0 introduced Unicode support, it was not complete until Perl 5.8. With encoding.pm, you can write any Perl script with whatever encoding type you want. If you’re a show off and worship anime movies, and want to write your Perl program in Kanji, use encoding, and be our guest:

# Cute example, slightly modified from the encoding.pm doc
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
 
use encoding 'euc-jp'; # Note that we support only one encoding

my $book = 'Camel';
my $Rakuda = "xF1xD1xF1xCC"; # Camel in Kanji
$book =~ s/Camel/$Rakuda/;