Hola...

DBD::SQLite (with version 3 of sqlite) can store UTF8 data, but when it's extracted perl doesn't recognize it as UTF8 but as a string of bytes.

For example, if I say (CDBI layer assumed)

$foo->name("????"); # appearantly perlmonks isn't using [gaal]'s patch
+ ;-)
# then later
$foo->name =~ /\p{Hebrew}/;
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then the answer is false.

Update: trying to make it clear that the actual conversion is not the problem, it's at what level the conversion will be done

This is kind of trivial to work around, all I need one of a million snippets like:

$string = Encode::decode_utf($string);
# or
utf8::decode($string) if !utf8::is_utf8($string) and utf8::valid($stri
+ng);
...
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for every string coming from the database. The problem is that I don't know how to do it except with a rather crude method - using Class::DBI's inflation mechanism to do this work.

Ideally I would like to tell DBD::SQLite that all the strings in the DB are UTF8 and should be interpreted as such. gaal made a patch against DBD::mysql to support similar functionality, but i'm not using mysql.