So where are we at now?

I've been following the discussion over the last little while about "converting
between utf8 and bytes", and wanted to get the final word on a couple of things.

If I have a file that I know is completely utf8 text, can I read it into a
string and have Perl (5.6.0) treat it as utf8 characters?

Is there a way to get a utf8 string from @argv?

Thanks in advance,

Neil.