http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1009555


in reply to Whether 'use utf8;' is good style

It's not a style issue. use utf8; tells Perl the file is encoded using UTF-8. If the file is encoded using UTF-8, use use utf8;. If your source code is encoded using US-ASCII or iso-8859-1, don't use use utf8;. It's that simple.

(Whether you encode your file using UTF-8 or not would be a style issue, but I don't see any real difference.)