"C" doesn't unpack 8-bit code points. If you want codepoints, use "U" or ord. It unpacks pre-Unicode characters and the "eight-bit" and "octet" comments are meant to make that clear. It is an accident of history that 'b' was used by "binary" (base 2) not "byte" and so "c" got used for "byte" (via the mnemonic "char").

That doesn't mean "c" should be changed to mean "character, perhaps multi-byte", especially given the nature of pack and unpack. pack and unpack have always been about how the bytes are encoded into memory. Trying to change them into pretending that they don't care about that is a huge mistake.

Update:

It doesn't hurt anything.

What part of "silent change" don't you understand?

- tye        

In reply to Re^7: Parsing UTF-16LE CSV Records Using Text::CSV* (5.10) by tye
in thread Parsing UTF-16LE CSV Records Using Text::CSV* by Jim

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