The preferred encoding in Perl is UTF-8, which is short for UCS Transformation Format 8-bit. Rob Pike and Ken Thompson defined this encoding one night on the back of a placemat in a New Jersey diner.^[427] It’s just one possible encoding, although a very popular one since it doesn’t have the drawbacks of some other encodings. If you’re using Windows, you’re likely to run into UTF-16. We don’t have anything nice to say about that encoding, so we’ll just keep quiet like our mothers told us.