Thanks for pointing out Encode::is_utf8($str), as I'd been wondering if there was something like this.

Ack! Please don't use that. It does NOT indicate whether something has been decoded or not. You have been misinformed.

A couple of things are still puzzling me, though. One is, the \xe2\x80\x9d sequence is in an encoding. What's it called?

It's the UTF-8 encoding of U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK.

Is there something that can be set at the start of a script to have all Perl IO default to ":encoding(UTF-8)"?

There is open. It's not perfect, but it'll do a lot. It can handle STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR, and it can the default for open.

In reply to Re^3: HTML::Entities and Unicode quotes by ikegami
in thread HTML::Entities and Unicode quotes by tod222

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