By default, Perl is for ASCII systems. If you need Perl for other character encoding, you better use Perl 5.8 and take the following precaution:

Headers

To use UTF8, or other non-ASCII characters, put the line

use utf8;

Console I/O

For console I/O, be sure to declare the encoding it is using beforehand:

binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(big5)";
binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";

For file I/O, use the following syntax:

open(FILE, ">:utf8", "filename.txt");
open(FILE, ">:encoding(big5)", "filename.txt");

or you can do this in two steps:

open(FILE, "filename.txt");
binmode(FILE, ":encoding(utf8)");

Conversion

To convert a string from one encoding to another, use:

Encode::from_to($data, "utf-8", "big5");

One-liner

Due to the inclusion of charset encoding engine in Perl 5.8, we can do a Big5 to UTF8 conversion in Perl like the following:

perl -Mencoding=big5,STDOUT,utf8 -pe1 < big5.txt > utf8.txt

HTML and LWP

In LWP, we usually use the following to get a response:

$response = $browser->get($url);
$content = $response->decoded_content;

This is OK for UTF8, ISO8859-1, etc. but not Big5 (because Big5 does not have any means to verify if it is valid). If the content encoding is known to be Big5, we can do the decoding manually:

$content = Encode::decode("big5", $response->content);

This is to get the raw content by $response->content and decode it under our control. If the content is not decoded but it contains some non-ASCII bytes, undetermined behavior may occur, depended on the character encoding your Perl believed it is in.