Somewhere in a script that has turned all UTF8 flags on, Perl seems to get confused.
No matter what I try, it destroys the encoding when writing the data to a file, by writing two characters for every Unicode byte.
Thus most Unicode characters become a 4-byte, 2-character near-random looking string.
Could the UTF8 flag be not set where it should be set?

As it is apparently impossible to reliably check the UTF8/Latin state of a string variable, the best solution might be just to set the UTF8 flag when the data is known good UTF8.
So, is there a function or some reliable technique to set the UTF8 flag?

Or could it maybe be a better idea in those cases to write the file as raw binary data instead, to circumvent unwanted conversions?

Any other idea what to do?

In reply to How to set the UTF8 flag? by dissident

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.