Summary: Strings internally stored as Latin 1 can be perfectly fine text strings. Trying to use is_utf8 to determine whether a string holds characters or octects is wrong.

Well. I never said anything against this truth. I guess the misunderstanding comes from the use of terms "characters" and "octets". These terms are used by perlunicode so I've used them here as well. In no way I'm implying that strings with utf8 flags will never have "characters". Of course perl will find "characters" in those strings in the contexts where it shall find "characters". The opposite is also true, perl will find "octects" in the strings with utf8 flag set, when the context demands it.

In original writing word "character" stood for CORRECT characters, not just some deduced characters. So, if the developer called Encode::decode then the character values will be correct, otherwise they'll be correct only if the octets happen to use Latin1 encoding. I hope this clarifies things.

In reply to Re^4: text encodings and perl by andal
in thread text encodings and perl by andal

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