Is there a way to disable utf8 from inside the script?

Greetings, Apologies if this has been discussed ad nauseum before. I looked at some previous perl-unicode messages on related topics, and tried a few things I found there and on perldoc.com with no success. Here's the deal: OS: Linux Red Hat 8.0 (I didn't install it) Perl: 5.8.0 (I didn't build it

Question on perl's /p{...} vs Unicode::UCD and perl 5.8.0 vs 5.8.1

I have a few quite general questions... Is there any quick summary of the unicode support changes in perl 5.8.1 (apart from the support of unicode 4.0)? BTW, I read the perldelta. Are there compelling reasons to upgrade to 5.8.1 if one is doing a lot of work with unicode? Are these general impro