I'm often getting confused by unicode issues -- about when a file stream is in unicode vs. not, but the latest is in a terminal interactive prog where I tried to print a unicode character and got a 'wide-char' error.

Of course I can easily work-around the problem by adding: 

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
binmode STDERR, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

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to the beginning of my program, but I'm not sure why it isn't *defaulting*. to UTF-8.

I'm running from windows to linux using SecureCRT, which, in its session options, has its 'character encoding' set to UTF-8.

When I log in, if I type locale, I get: 

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

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That **looks** like it's saying UTF-8 for a character encoding (this is a Suse11.2 system I'm logging into, BTW, from a Win7 (i.e. unicode supporting) system).

So why is perl *defaulting* to STDOUT being non-unicode?

Why do I need the binmode?

Sorry if this is unicode-first-grade, but this stuff looks like it should be so 'simple' -- yet *blech*. I've had other issues when operating on 'internet data' where I've experienced UTF nightmares, since you don't know the character encoding of the website's response until you look at the header -- which I worked around mostly until perl worked itself into a serious coredump about 3,500,000 statements / 70,000 data lines statements into the program (to which some suggested I get to know "perl -d " ... *cough* ...I do, but not um...trying to track that down -- I just shelved the program to wait for a more reliable perl (I did, FWIW, file a bug against Perl, that has yet to be addressed that I know of).

Any idea why perl isn't just 'doing the right thing' as it is so famous for doing? Thanks...

In reply to why no default unicode? by perl-diddler

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