> As mentioned in the Topic header I'm on a Mac running High Sierra. No, the topic header just says "Mac". That word spans almost 40 years of history in computing. That isn't "details". > This is perl 5, version 18, subversion 2 (v5.18.2) I've been successfully doing Unicode in Perl since 5.6, so it can be done. Indeed, the diagram above is a re-drawing of one of my early posts on the topic, from another forum. > it doesn't seem my console is UTF-8 compatible. What does the `locale` command give? Are you using a terminal other than Apple's own Terminal.app?