#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use 5.010;
use strict;
use locale;	# de_DE.UTF-8
use utf8;
use Encode qw( encode );
 
my $string = 'abcäöüß';
my @match = $string =~ /([[:word:]])/g;
say encode( 'utf8', "@match" ); # a b c ä ö ü ß