(Formerly: Expected Unicode code points or ASCII depending on UTF8 flag.)

I guess that what you call "Unicode code point" is what I call "ISO-8859-1". ISO-8859-1 is simply the encoding that maps the byte values from 0 to 255 to the Unicode codepoints from 0 to 255, in that order.

Perl never assumes or expects iso-8859-1. 
$ echo -e "\xE4"|perl -wE 'say <> ~~ /\w/'
1
$ # this a perl 5.14.1

[download]

Since no decoding step happened here, and <> is a binary operation, and the regex match a text operation, perl has to assume a character encoding. And that happens to be ISO-8859-1. Or what do you think it is, if not ISO-8859-1?

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re^3: How does the built-in function length work? by moritz
in thread How does the built-in function length work? by PerlOnTheWay

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