The 'perluniintro' and 'perlunicode' may be of help, online
for example at http://www.perldoc.com/,
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perluniintro.html
http://www.perldoc.com/perl5.8.0/pod/perlunicode.html
As Autrijus mentioned, the implicit "UTF-8-ification" based on
one's locale settings is
> I understand that Mac developers would consider a conversion to unicode
> "lossy" or "non-reversible" if the directionality indicators are not
> preserved somehow (using RLE/LRE or RLO/LRO), and this might constitute
> an "algorithmic" approach that 'enc2xs' would not support.
>
> Is there a wo