In Windows, we are used to needing binmode for byte streams that are not text. In the perldelta,
Note that after this Perl really does assume that everything is UTF-8: for example if some input handle is not, Perl will probably very soon complain about the input data like this ``Malformed UTF-8 ...'' since any old eight-bit data is not legal UTF-8.

Note for code authors: if you want to enable your users to use UTF-8 as their default encoding but in your code still have eight-bit I/O streams (such as images or zip files), you need to explicitly open() or binmode() with :bytes (see perlfunc/open and perlfunc/binmode), or you can just use binmode(FH) (nice for pre-5.8.0 backward compatibility).

So, now everyone needs to do it (if LC_LANG etc. look like they are set to UTF-8). Well, that doesn't bother us, since we're used to distinghishing text from bytes.

My musing is that having a little eccentricity at the beginning helps you with portability issues later, since you've already planned on a few things without having to cover them in depth.

—John

In reply to It's good to be a little different! by John M. Dlugosz

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