So, does Perl assume by default, even in a UTF-8 environment, that it should output everything in Latin-1 ?

Perl tries to not convert anything at all, automatically.

And since Latin-1 (mostly?) maps the first 256 codepoints 1:1 to bytes, outputting something without any conversion is the same as outputting it as Latin-1.

Note that this round-trips binary data, which means that if your scripts or input use UTF-8, and you don't use utf8;, the output will be UTF-8 again.

But, Latin-1 is limited to codepoints up to 255, so if something higher than that shows up in your string, perl falls back to UTF-8 (and warns).

(As always, I'm linking to Encodings and Unicode in Perl, in the hope that it's useful to you).

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

In reply to Re^3: Default encoding rules leave me puzzled... (use open qw/ :std :locale /; by moritz
in thread Default encoding rules leave me puzzled... by kzwix

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