It sounds like you want the utf8 flag on handles to go away and just have the output encoding depend on perl's internal encoding of the data
No, that's not an accurate characterization. I would like filehandles -- particularly STDOUT -- to be encoding-agnostic by default. However, it should be possible to turn on encoding enforcement using the current mechanism.
It sounded like you meant 
perl -we'$_ = "\xb1"; print; utf8::upgrade($_); print'

[download]
should output three bytes, not two (if STDOUT is not utf8) or four (if STDOUT is utf8, e.g. with -CO). If that's not your "encoding-agnostic" (that I call "the output depending on perl's internal encoding of the data"), I'm not sure what you mean by "encoding-agnostic".

In reply to Re^3: Interventionist Unicode Behaviors by ysth
in thread Interventionist Unicode Behaviors by creamygoodness

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.