Interesting concept... Anyway, I guess if I was trying to do something like this, I'd just be sure to redirect the output of re 'debug' to a file, and inspect that when I want to with something other than a tty ("od", maybe, or some other hex-mode capable viewer/editor).

hv's idea is pretty cool, but ascii control codes (\x00 - \x1F, \x7F) are still control codes, even when they're "utf8" -- because all ascii code points are already utf8 anyway, by definition. (Perl's internal distinction between a "string of octets" and a "string of utf8" is just that: perl's internal distinction; once printed to some output, there is no difference for this range of code points.)

And \x{0080} - \x{009F} aren't properly displayable either... who knows what you'll see when you feed these to a console -- even one that's unicode savvy?