No, it's because the regex engine expects Unicode code points (the result of decode), not UTF-8 (what MySQL returned).

It has nothing to do with backwards compatibility, or with being an old language. e.g. Java's regex library similarly expects chars, not bytes.

In reply to Re^2: Matching/replacing a unicode character only works after decode() by ikegami
in thread Matching/replacing a unicode character only works after decode() by FloydATC

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