Thanks for this and yes, this is the approach we are currently trying.

The data in this case is coming from a db with a db layer which isn't capable of automatically tagging data as utf8 (as well as sundry other places).

But simply replacing calls to decode with calls to a wrapper function which does this check adds an additional perl function call and regex per db call, which has its own (small) overhead.

It's do-able, and is the best way forward I can see at the moment, but I was hoping for an "ah...that behaviour changed in version X.y, you can get the old behaviour by frobbing this magic flag", from a wise monk. (I couldn't see anything in Encode.pm and friends, but I didn't dig into the XS).

I'm also still very surprised that this behaviour has changed against the docs.

In reply to Re^4: Behaviour of Encode::decode_utf8 on ASCII by jbert
in thread Behaviour of Encode::decode_utf8 on ASCII by jbert

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