#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.010;
use strict;
use utf8;
use locale;
use POSIX qw( locale_h );
use Encode qw( encode );
my $latin_locale = setlocale( LC_CTYPE, 'de_DE.ISO8859-1' );

my $string = 'abcäöüß';
my @match = $string =~ /(\w)/g;
say encode( 'utf-8', "@match" ); # a b c ä ö ü ß