/\d{2}/ will always match two characters exactly. But doesn't perl produce polymorphic opcodes for pattern matching which does different things based on the input string encoding? In case of multi-byte encoding, what is /.{2}/ supposed to match? 2 bytes or 2 characters in the given encoding?

And yes, the code having the problem isn't the code I posted. But I can assure you the code having the problem is doing the same thing. The actual code reads the value of $datetime from a unicode encoded XML file, reads the pattern to match from a config file and populates the fields accordingly. I am dumping both $datetime and $regex before doing a pattern match and they are exactly what I have shown here.

I have anecdotal evidence that perl's unicode implementation have a role to play in this. I removed: 

use utf8;

[download]
directive and now it works as it's supposed to be.

In reply to Re^2: Simple pattern match failing - Possibly unicode issue by irahul
in thread Simple pattern match failing - Possibly unicode issue by irahul

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