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There seems to be a discrepancy between the documentation for perlpod and
its behaviour.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html says

=encoding encodingname

This command is used for declaring the encoding of a document. Most
users won’t need this; but if your encoding isn’t US-ASCII or Latin-1,
then put a =encoding encodingname command early in the document so
that pod formatters will know how to decode the document. For
encodingname, use a name recognized by the Encode::Supported module.
Examples:

=encoding utf8

=encoding koi8-r

=encoding ShiftJIS

=encoding big5

However, perldoc says

../mymodule.pm:1: Unknown command paragraph "=encoding utf8"

pod2html produced a similar message.

It doesn't depend on the location of the =encoding since I tried putting
it in various positions.

Can anyone explain this?