The use utf8 pragma tells the Perl parser to allow UTF-8 in the program text in the current lexical scope (allow UTF-EBCDIC on EBCDIC based platforms). The no utf8 pragma tells Perl to switch back to treating the source text as literal bytes in the current lexical scope.

This module is an interface to the gnome project's libxslt. This is an extremely good XSLT engine, highly compliant and also very fast. I have tests showing this to be more than twice as fast as Sablotron.