Can you trust your terminal emulator to properly handle the output?

To me, encoding issues are always a wild goose chase, so I like to eliminate as many things from the encoding dance as quickly as possible. Usually that means that instead of including umlauts (or whatever) in my source code, I use the character names instead:

# instead of
use utf8;
my $s = "göre";
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# I prefer to use
use charnames;
my $s = "g\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS}re";
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This eliminates the issue that my text editor is lying to me.

When inspecting the output, I either pipe the output through hexdump or through Data::Dumper with $Data::Dumper::Useqq =1; so the console only sees 7bit ASCII.

This eliminates my terminal emulator lying to me.

Of course, that does not help with reading data from files that I don't control, but every little step helps.