No, because the string isn't in utf8 but in the default 8bit encoding.
Sorry, that should have been $string = Encode::decode('iso-8859-1',$string)

From the Encode docs:

the UTF8 flag for $string is on unless $octets entirely consists of ASCII data (or EBCDIC on EBCDIC machines).

However, that wouldn't work for $string = 'ρα'; without a preceeding use utf8; because it would, by default be stored internally as Latin-1, and here you would need to utf8::upgrade($string).

From the perlunicode docs:

By default, there is a fundamental asymmetry in Perl's unicode model: implicit upgrading from byte strings to Unicode strings assumes that they were encoded in *ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)*, but Unicode strings are downgraded with UTF-8 encoding. This happens because the first 256 codepoints in Unicode happens to agree with Latin-1.

Have I got this right?

Clint

In reply to Re^6: A UTF8 round trip with MySQL by clinton
in thread A UTF8 round trip with MySQL by clinton

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.