(or possibly 8 Unicode if they were automatically converted for the comparison), but I get 5 non-Unicode and 3 Unicode?? What gives?
No, as far as perl is concerned, you start with 4 Unicode strings and get 8 Unicode strings... in different storage formats. utf8 flag says pretty much nothing about "Unicodeness".

Is that a problem that encode('utf-8', $_) returns what is indistinguishable from "Unicode string" (as people usually understand it)? Yes, it's a problem in practice.

Think about it this way: "1" in perl is struct PV, 1 is struct IV, "1" + 1 is PVIV (if i remember correctly). Now, what would happen if, say, the string concatenation operator was '+' (plus)? How would you determine what $x + $y actually do? What if cmp did the same thing as <=>, ge was just like =? How would you sort numbers?

That's the situation with "Unicode" and "binary" strings in Perl, pretty much. As Ricardo Signes said:
Right now, you can write programs in Perl that handle all this correctly, using only one tool: extreme vigilance. Or, more likely, two tools: vigilance and a debugger.
I personally Devel::Peek instead of debugger :)

Oh, and here's an example of a non-Unicode string:

"\x{FFFF_FFFF_FFFF}"

[download]
(Unicode doesn't have such a big "codepoint")

In reply to Re^3: Mixed Unicode and ANSI string comparisons? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Mixed Unicode and ANSI string comparisons? by BrowserUk

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