Other than requiring everyone to use 4-byte unicode (which I agree would make life a lot easier for us grunts!) ... what possible solutions do you have in mind?

For example, you complain that the output from the parser uses the :raw layer.

• How would you have the encoding pragma propagate appropriately? Maybe it's a lexically scoped pragma. (Think strict and warnings.)
• Can you pass an $fh in to XML::Parser? If you can, is its IO layer set correctly if you open it in your script?

I'm not sure what the right solution is in 5.8.x, let alone in modules (like PDF::Template which uses XML::Parser) that have to support 5.005, 5.6.x, and 5.8.x. (I have nightmares about this, frankly, especially because I speak only Latin-1 languages.)

You might be interested to see the plethora of discussions that the parrot-dev and perl6-language lists have been having about this. If they are having issues when working on the problem for over a year now, it's amazing that a bunch of modules that ad-hoc'ced together work at all, let along as well as they do!