use utf8; use Data::Dumper; use strict; use warnings; my $a; $a = "/i/\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH ACUTE}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER U WITH ACUTE}z/pl"; print Dumper($a);