It's not a "bug" per-se

It is. And that's the official name for code that behaves differently depending on the internal representation of a string.

just unspecified behavior that people constantly run into.

The issue is not that the behaviour is unspecified. A lot of Perl behaviour is unspecified. That's not really an issue because there's only one Perl interpreter. The interpreter is the language, so to speak.

The issue is that two equal strings produce different results. That is most definitely a bug.

$d eq $u is true in the snippet I provided earlier, so open should do the same for both. But it doesn't. That's a bug.

there is no one-size-fits-all solution for character encoding,

Not so. In this area, it's most definitely possibly to provide an interface that works on all systems.

until such time as Strawberry releases a perl.exe with the UTF-8 codepage configured.

I did file a ticket requesting this some time ago.

In reply to Re^4: how are ARGV and filename strings represented? by ikegami
in thread how are ARGV and filename strings represented? by almr

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