There have been a lot of Unicode related improvements in Perl 5.14, so for this it is definitely worth trying to use the most recent perl you can.
See perl5140delta#Full_functionality_for_use_feature_unicode_strings and The perl 5.14 release announcement on perl monks.
The Download Perl page provides docs on how to download and install the latest perl. In summary if you are on Linux Mac or Unix then use Perl Brew to automate downloading and compiling perl. If you are on windows then ActiveState now have a build of Perl 5.14. There is no Strawberry Perl release of 5.14 yet.
