Basically, I don't understand in which way the encoding pragma modifies pack's behavior. In short, why do the following two commands not output the same value:

$ perl -Mencoding=utf8 -e 'print(pack('n', 204))'
$ perl -e 'print(pack('n', 204))'

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The former outputs 0x00 0xC3 0x8C, the other outputs 0x00 0xCC.

I would have expected the bahavior of n to be unchanged, and the value of 204 to be unchanged both regardless of encoding. However, one (or both) is modified by the encoding. In which way, I don't understand.

For bonus points: How can I use encoding 'utf8', and still get 0x00 0xCC?

In reply to use encoding affects pack() by rasher

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