If encoding and decoding '' did reproduce '', you could then complain that encoding and decoding undef would not reproduce undef (but '' instead)...
But isn't the 'standard' (or at any rate the typical) Perl way to handle  undef in numeric and string contexts to coerce it to 0 or the empty string, respectively, and issue warnings as appropriate? Conversely, is there any other numeric or string context in which the empty string is coerced to undef?
Reason is that uuencoding-wise, there is no way to distinguish an empty string from an undefined value...
Are you saying by this that the UU-encoding standard specifies no way to encode an empty string, i.e., that an empty string is, literally, 'undefined' in the standard? If this is the case, I would expect  undef to be produced by the encoding step as well as by decoding.

Perhaps the basic problem here is that I am simply unfamiliar with and do not understand the UU-encoding process.

In reply to Re^2: UU-decode unpack of empty string yields undefined value by AnomalousMonk
in thread UU-decode unpack of empty string yields undefined value by AnomalousMonk

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