For perl 5.6.x, thus including UTF-8 support but not coming with Encode, you can use pack. In the following, the first character ("C" or "U") indicates the type of packed string, which will be used for the whole string, the second is a character/byte count of zero. "a*" packs the actual string data.

Actually, that will still work on perl 5.8.x, though the few (well hidden) functions in Encode are a valid alternative. See Messing with Perl's Internals. Somehow I get the feeling they don't like you to mess with this, yourself...

In reply to Re: Recommended way to set the utf8 flag without altering the data by bart
in thread Recommended way to set the utf8 flag without altering the data by borisz

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