While this works, I found that I should still use "Encode" to decode any strings I have which are in a different language. This is exactly what Template Toolkit does when you add "ENCODING => 'UTF-8'".

use Encode 'decode';
my $decoded = decode( 'UTF-8', $string );

The requirement to decode to UTF-8 manually might be fixed internally in Dancer, but I *think* that hasn't been decided yet. However, don't take my word for it. See what works for you.

S.

P.S.:
Either way, that would be pretty difficult to do since some template engines let you get past a lot of abstraction so you can send a resultset and from the methods and attributes get the data. If our template engines supported value-only input, that would be easier to do. But what's the fun in that? :)