So you mean the OP didn't intend to ask if the flag is switched but if there are cases of automatic (undocumented) decoding or encoding?
I would consider any such encoding a bug. I can't see a rational for degrading from text to binary, unless you use a bit oriented operator.
Decoding from binary to text can happen, like if a transformation like lc or uc can't map otherwise.°
But that's documented and can be configured too, AFAIR.
And to be honest, treating a binary string as ASCII/Latin-1 is guesswork from Perl, it could be anything.
Strictly speaking lc and uc shouldn't be allowed then, the programmer should have properly decoded it first.
°) or generally if only utf8-text characters are added. |