#!/usr/bin/perl use Encode qw/encode decode is_utf8/; for my $scalar ( map { encode( 'iso-8859-1', chr( $_ )) } 0xa0 .. 0xff ) { printf( "decoding %s makes %s difference\n", $scalar, ( test( $scalar ) ? "no" : "some sort of" )); } sub test { my $x = shift; my $y = Encode::decode('iso-8859-1', $x); print "(flag diff...) " if ( is_utf8( $x ) ne is_utf8( $y )); if ($x eq $y) { return 1; } else { return 0; } }