That's not exactly how it works. Under use utf8;, quoted strings can already contain unicode characters:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature qw{ say };
use utf8;

my $string = 'Pérl Mönx';
say length $string; # 9, not 11
[download]

See The "Unicode Bug" for details.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
[download]

the Perl5 compiler expects the source code to be 8 bit ANSI characters.1

2 The open question is, when use feature 'unicode_strings'; is in effect, would "\x80\x77" be interpreted as 2 characters ("\x80" "\x77") or 1 ("\N{U+8077}") ?

If you want it to remain binary data on output, you must tell perl not to convert it. On input, perl assumes the byte values 0x80-0xFF refer to character identities that coincidentally have the same meaning as the Unicode character with the same value (U+0080 - U+00FF).

That's the Perl-Unicode bug. Perl is not round-trip safe by default. If you wanted it in binary (as indicated by the fact that it's not encoded properly for UTF-8, but is for ISO-8859, perl will still convert it to UTF-8 for you on output and generate a run-time warning about "wide characters" in output.

If you meant for it to be valid UTF8 encoded Unicode, you would have encoded it as such (with the 0xC2 in front of each character over 0x7F). However, if you do, you will still get an error as perl treats valid (but not labeled) UTF-8 on input as *BINARY*, and your code will see 2 values for each single Unicode character -- 0xC2 and the 2nd character.

So if you don't label your input, and you use character values >0x7F and <0x100, you will get wrong behavior out of your program -- either on output (if you intended binary), or on input if you encoded using UTF-8.

More than one application uses a heuristic to avoid maximum harm to the user -- i.e. if 0xC2 is detected before a byte in the range 0x7F <= CHAR <= 0xFF, then assume input is UTF-8, else if CHAR > 0x7F, assume binary was intended. It isn't perfect, as 0xC2 followed by another character in the >0x7F zone, can occur in binary code, but it is statistically unlikely, and good enough for most users who are obvious to the need to label their I/O streams.

Of course you would only engage such heuristics when using stream I/O on STDIN/OUT/ERR. Files opened with "open" would always be interpreted as binary unless specified otherwise.

However, due to some zeal to go Unicode in 5.8.0, all files got interpreted as UTF-8 if your locale specified UTF-8 to be used for encoding. That caused a kneejerk reaction to revert to the "Perl-Unicode" bug to cause errors & warnings where stream and/or file labeling wasn't used.

The perl situation is completely different than the HTML problem -- in that HTML5 already specifies the default character set as UTF-8, while older sites using HTML4 may still be interpreted as ISO-8859, even though Unicode has been out for over 20 years. Sigh...

My point was simply to suggest alternate fixes to the Perl Monks website.

Obviously, the best is to never mess with what's between code tags.

But, this would require PM to send proper, UTF8 encoded response content back to browsers.

There may be technical reason why the PM website can't do that. Possible work-arounds to that include (but not limited to):

• Save the content between code tags as-is, only applying entity encoding when generating HTML. Then download links would provide the code content as-is using "Content-type: application/octet".
• For content between code tags, use "\x" encoding instead of entity encoding. Since (at least for now), non-7-bit-characters are most likely to occur in quoted strings, Perl itself would be able to decode the characters that appear in quoted strings. (Of course, if they are in the actual source code, either entity or \x encoding will make a mess.)

Again, these are just alternatives to the proper solution. It would be great if PM is able to properly support UFT8 content. We may have to live with a work around.

But, this would require PM to send proper, UTF8 encoded response content back to browsers.

Why? It works now without any extra work in normal text. The only problem is in the CODE blocks, BECAUSE, something reformats input into HTML-entities.

To fix that, I'd first try not doing that conversion in a code block (and maybe not in text areas). I seem to remember that the HTML entities were provided to allow having "special chars" (special to HTML syntax, like "<" and "&", etc..). But characters above U+0x0079 shouldn't be a problem if they were left "untouched". To handle display of "special chars" in any of the input -- only convert them to HTML-entities on post (if necessary). I'd bet that anything above the normal ASCII range would be fine to leave untouched.