Hi,

I have a subroutine that takes a scalar (which I call payload) and prints it to an instance of IO::Socket::INET. The socket has had binmode($socket, ':raw') called for it.

My problem is that the payload variable may or may not have its utf8 flag set. If it does then I get the "Wide character in print' warning. I can silence the warning by always calling Encode::_utf8_off on the incoming data (or probably some "no warning" incantation) but I wasn't expecting this behaviour. I mistakenly thought that adding the :raw layer to the socket would set it up to accept any arbitrary bytes without worrying about what they were - in addition to telling it to not fiddle with the bytes on their way through. Clearly this isn't the case so I thought I would seeks others wisdom as to the most elegant solution in this case.

Is there a layer that does mean that? Do I just have to accept I need to call _utf8_off on each variable that might have utf8 data in it? Am I approaching the problem in the wrong way?

I did try pack('a*', $payload) but the utf8 flag is preserved in pack's return value.

Some slightly related questions if I may -

Are there any circumstances where pack('a*', $payload) does not give the same value was $payload?
Why is the OO binmode method available for IO::File but not IO::Handle? Is it not applicable to all handles?

In reply to The utf8 flag and print()ing binary data by Anonymous Monk

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