You misunderstood the situation. The victims of the problem never intended to use locale information in any way in their scripts, and the scripts were not written to use locale information. It just suddenly turned out (when the script was run on that particular RedHat release with that particular Perl version) that the use of locale information was imposed on them as "the new default" -- and many of them couldn't figure out why their scripts were suddenly failing until they turned to the community for help.

"Oh, you need to change your shell environment so it doesn't use the new default utf8 locale, and/or you need to change your existing perl scripts..."

As a rule, if you want to build some new functionality into a tool, and this is incompatible in some way with previous functionality that has an established base of users, it's better not to require that those established users change all their code for the sake of the new feature (which they might not have wanted in the first place).

In reply to Re^3: Pragma to handle unicode characters by graff
in thread Pragma to handle unicode characters by wanradt

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