in reply to What is the proper way to deal with Char v. Byte Semantics
I have to say I had exactly the same problem trying to send
UTF8 encoded XML stuff over HTTP (using Frontier::RPC2). Perl and me both got terribly confused over whether any given string was UTF8 or not.
This ended up being a complete nightmare especially since this code had to work on 5.5 and 5.6. In the end I worked out that something in Frontier::RPC2 was converting my strings to UTF8 behind my back under 5.6 whereas I had to convert them by hand in 5.5.
I experimented with 'use bytes' too but that didn't cut it either.
This code snipped might be useful
Altogether a very unpleasant experience which makes me think that 5.6 isn't really ready for UTF :-( Maybe 5.8 will be better in this regard.$unicode_perl = 1; { local $SIG{__DIE__}; eval "use utf8; 1" or $unicode_perl = 0; }
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