Say I have a string that contains UTF-8 encoded text, but Perl thinks that string has byte orientation. How do I set the magic bit to tell Perl that it's character oriented?

I did it before with a taint-like trick, but I can't remember how exactly.

It seems to work if I use a taint-like trick, in that /^(.*)$/so; will give me $1 in character-orientation if this RE was issued while use utf8 was in effect, regardless of the orientation of the string that the RE was applied to.

Is that right, or just luck?

Is there a better/proper way to do it, yet?

It's maddening that features of Unicode support were not finished (e.g. I/O disciplines) and newer versions do more and more "character" (not byte) stuff, but the primitives needed to fill the gap ourselves are not exposed, for no good reason.

—John

Edit kudra, 2001-07-23 Corrected title

In reply to How do you impose "character" orientation on a string? by John M. Dlugosz

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