I'm writing a routine that needs to deal with bytes even when the string contains multibyte characters. "use bytes" of course does the trick but would break on pre-5.6 perl (alas, I need to be able to have this run on 5.004+). So, I need to ask the compiler to use the bytes pragma only if it exists...
I *think* this will do the trick but wanted to confirm with those who are wiser than I that I'm not missing anything important here: