Update: Corrected spelling and capitalization mistakes.

As best I can tell, with out use utf8; in your Perl5 program, the Perl5 compiler expects the source code to be 8 bit ANSI characters.1 With use utf8; in effect, you may have UTF8 encoded characters in your source code.

Quoted strings, by default, are treated a streams of 8 bit bytes. With use feature 'unicode_strings'; in effect, you can include UTF8 encoded characters in quoted strings.

If PM could store the characters/bytes within code tags as-is, then only apply HTML encoding when generating HTML output, I think that would achieve the desired result. (the download link could supply the "raw" bytes with Content-type: application/octet)

If that can't be done, maybe instead of HTML encoding, do \x encoding. Either way, non-7-bit-ANSI source code gets messed up, but at least double quoted strings might still be correctly interpreted by the Perl compiler.2

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1 I haven't tried using characters in the range 0x80 .. 0xFF in identifiers in Perl5, but Perl5 keywords all use characters < 0x80.

2 The open question is, when use feature 'unicode_strings'; is in effect, would "\x80\x77" be interpreted as 2 characters ("\x80" "\x77") or 1 ("\N{U+8077}") ?

In reply to Re^3: BUG: code blocks don't retain literal formatting -- could they? by RonW
in thread BUG: code blocks don't retain literal formatting -- could they? by perl-diddler

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