#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Data::Dumper; use JSON; my $json = q({"my": "En d\u00e9mocratie, on a le droit d'avoir tort"}); my $perl = decode_json $json; my $flag_utf8 = utf8::is_utf8($perl->{'my'}) ? 1 : 0; print "is unicode: $flag_utf8\n"; print Dumper($perl), "\n";