In perl-5.8.x the binmode built-in (and "open") have added more Unicode-related layers like ":utf8" or ":encoding(iso-8859-1)". However, they are completly unavailable and throw an exception in perl-5.6.x. I'm looking for a way to replace or emulate their behaviour in perl-5.6.x.

Specifically, in XML-RSS-1.30, we have the following code: 

sub save {
    my ($self, $file) = @_;
    open(OUT, ">:encoding($self->{encoding})", "$file")
      or croak "Cannot open file $file for write: $!";
    print OUT $self->as_string;
    close OUT;
}

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Assuming we want the contents of $self->as_string() to be stored in the file using the encoding $self->{encoding}, what should we do in perl-5.6.x instead? Will Encode.pm be of any help?

We'll probably keep the code for perl-5.8.x as is, but also add some workarounds for perl-5.6.x.

In reply to Replacing perl-5.8.x's filehandle "layers" in perl-5.6.x by shlomif

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