Or you could standardize the internal representation. A string is a sequence of code points. Storing the sequence length could be handy when dealing predominantly with string objects. Then the following cases arise:

Extended 8-bit charsets (ISO8859) suffer with UTF-8 internal representation, unless you hack the (ncodepts==nbytes) to indicate native format...

More interesting is the interaction between objects. Considering a blob and a string object: 

$foo = ($str . $obj);
$bar = ($obj . $str);
$baz = "${obj}${str}";

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When is the blob promoted to a string, when does the opposite happen? Object representation and efficiency are certainly big concerns, but surely the semantic implications of unicode are far more insidious.

In reply to Re^5: JSON::XS (and JSON::PP) appear to generate invalid UTF-8 for character in range 127 to 255 by oiskuu
in thread JSON::XS (and JSON::PP) appear to generate invalid UTF-8 for character in range 127 to 255 by Ovid

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