This is not what you want to say

Indeed. I discovered this reading JavaFan's post.

What I think you meant to say

Perfect. I shall update.

a grouping of (usually but not always) 8 consecutive bits of physical storage

UTF8=0 storage format.

the problem being (as noted by others) that most people associate "byte" with (1)

If so, then reading 5 bytes produces a variable number of bytes*. That doesn't jive.

If I read 5 bytes from a file, what I get if 5 bytes as far as I'm concerned. I'm open to a better word that "byte" for this, but I haven't come across one.

One could possibly commandeer "octet"

An octet is simply an 8-bit byte. But since that's what byte means in all relevant circumstances anyway*, "octet" is no better than "byte".

* — Perl doesn't currently support systems with byte sizes other than 8.

There's also the small matter that it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use UTF-8-flag-on format to store something that is composed of octets, even if it is indeed possible to do.

No, but it can happen. Say you have: 

# É as C9 in source.
print $bin_fh "AX100ÉX";

[download]

And say one day you convert your source files to UTF-8. 

# É as C3 E9 in source.
use utf8;
print $bin_fh "AX100ÉX";

[download]

The code is still fine, yet the string in the latter has UTF8=1.

In reply to Re^2: Jargon relating to Perl strings by ikegami
in thread Jargon relating to Perl strings by ikegami

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