How simple do you want encoding/decoding? Would you like Perl to "automagically" encode/decode JSON? ASN.1? Why, specifically, do you demand it of UTF-8?

The truth is that UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding method. It's probably a good thing that you have to explicitly decode inputs and encode outputs.. it forces you to know what you are doing.

Update: an example: e-mail - yes, you can send e-mails as UTF-8! But were you aware that MIME headers must be in a 7-bit encoding? In this case blindly opening a socket and telling it to encode all UTF-8 output will severely break your application. It is much better to know specifically when and where encoding is appropriate and permissible..

In reply to Re^2: Pragma to handle unicode characters by monarch
in thread Pragma to handle unicode characters by wanradt

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