Manual, or with Automatic with PerlIO layers MySQL::dbd > v 4 --------------- ---------------- --------- --------- ---------- ¦ UTF-8 ¦ ---decode_utf8()->> ¦ Perl ¦ ---encode_utf8()->> ¦ UTF-8 ¦ ¦ Console ¦ <<-encode_utf8()--- ¦ strings ¦ <<-decode_utf8()--- ¦ MySQL DB ¦ --------- --------- ----------