Perl assumes everything (except newlines) is bytes unless you tell it otherwise. Python 2 did the same. Python 3 assumes (almost) everything is utf-8 unless you tell it otherwise. Of the three, Python 3 is arguably the most broken. I can attest to this having to occasionally work with python and ISO-8859-15 files.

Tom Christiansen's answer on Stack Overflow seems to be the definitive answer to why perl doesn't do it this way. perldoc perluniintro, perlunitut, perlunifaq, and perlunicode should give you most of what you want to know about unicode in perl.

In reply to Re^12: Converting Unicode by jeffenstein
in thread Converting Unicode by BernieC

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.