Yes, it is very unfortunate. Perl's Unicode capabilities are some of the best among all programming languages (I think only ICU is comparable?), but its string handling is very confusing, and the documentation is huge and all over the place. There were discussions about that already... Basically, the best way is to decode all input and encode all output. The main tools are: use utf8, use open... (the pragma), open the function, binmode and Encode. Of course, if some filenames are not valid utf8, they can't be decoded as such.

In reply to Re^7: problem with hashes, loaded from file by Anonymous Monk
in thread problem with hashes, loaded from file by igoryonya

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