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 ¦
 ---------                       ---------                       ----------
                               

##</code><code>##


    CREATE TABLE test_db.test ( string VARCHAR(50) ) CHARACTER SET utf8;


##</code><code>##


    use Encode qw( decode_utf8 );
    my $string      = <>;
    my $utf8_string = decode_utf8($string);


##</code><code>##


   use Encode qw( decode );
   my $iso_8859_string = <>;
   my $utf8_string     = decode('ISO-8859-1',$iso_8859_string);


##</code><code>##


    use utf8;         # Tells Perl that the script itself is written in UTF-8

    my $utf8_string = "UTF-8 string with special chars: ñ æ ô";


##</code><code>##


    use DBI();
    my $dbh = DBI->connect ('dbi:mysql:test_db',
                            $username,
                            $password, 
                            {mysql_enable_utf8 => 1}
    );


##</code><code>##


    $dbh->do('INSERT INTO test_db.test VALUES(?)', $utf8_string);

    $dbh->do('SELECT string FROM test_db.test LIMIT 1');
    my $new_string = $dbh->fetchrow_arrayref->[0];


##</code><code>##


    use Encode qw( encode_utf8 );
    print Encode::encode_utf8($new_string);

 OR

    # Add an auto-encoding layer
    binmode (STDIN,':utf8');
    print $new_string;


##</code><code>##


    use Encode qw( encode );
    print Encode::encode('ISO-8859-1', $new_string);