1. No, quite the opposite in fact.
  2. No, you can do so more generally (see point 3). Yes, there are many other encodings today than utf8. Thank your lucky stars you are not forced to deal with MSWin32 encodings. :) There are also a plethora of data available from the past half century much of which utilises encodings other than utf8.
  3. use open qw(:utf8); or export PERL_UNICODE=S for example

In reply to Re^6: Lost in encoding in Twig by hippo
in thread Lost in encoding in Twig by pcouderc

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