it's almost always better to have all utf-8 encoded strings marked and use the :utf8 IO layers

Good point

trying to insert a $string into a utf-8 column will not work correctly if the $string is in the default 8-bit encoding with the high bit set (for instance, when $string is in Latin-1 with accented characters)

I think I understand - is this what you mean:

• If we have : $string = 'latin-1 áccented striñg';
• The string is stored internally with bytes > 128, but without UTF-8 flag turned on, but Perl still understands this string.
• DBD::mysql does not recognise this as UTF-8 (because missing UTF-8 flag, so accented characters are stripped.
• utf8::upgrade($string) turns on the flag
• DBD::mysql recognises this as UTF-8 and stores it correctly

Would using $string = Encode::decode_utf8($string) $string = Encode::decode('iso-8859-1',$string) also work in this case?

Clint

Update - corrected decode

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