I have PERL_UNICODE set to SDL, ${^UNICODE} reports back 95.(¹)

This is really comfy for my UTF8 locale, as filehandles and STDFOO are already marked as :utf8 or something(²) and the utf8-related warnings disappear and that allows me to be more lazy while programming, especially for oneliners.

But I cannot get rid of this one which happens whenever I pass a descriptive string to Test::More's ok() with characters whose ord() > 255.(³)

$ perl -e'use Test::More tests => 1; ok 1, "\x{2639}";'
1..1
Wide character in print at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/Test/Builder.pm line 1
+172.
ok 1 - ☹
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I tried to track down the cause of that(⁴) and suspect it's the way filehandles are set up at Test/Builder.pm ll. 1317. I managed to reproduce a minimal test case in the debugger.

$ perl -d -e0

Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.28
Editor support available.

Enter h or `h h' for help, or `man perldebug' for more help.

main::(-e:1):   0
                                                                      
+                         DB<1> open(TESTOUT, ">&STDOUT") or die "Can'
+t dup STDOUT:  $!";

                                                                      
+                         DB<2> $fh = \*TESTOUT;

                                                                      
+                         DB<3> print $fh "\x{2639}";
Wide character in print at (eval 23)[/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/perl5db.pl:6
+28] line 2.
 at (eval 23)[/usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/perl5db.pl:628] line 2
        eval '($@, $!, $^E, $,, $/, $\\, $^W) = @saved;package main; $
+^D = $^D | $DB::db_stop;
print $fh "\\x{2639}";;

;' called at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/perl5db.pl line 628
        DB::eval called at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/perl5db.pl line 3412
        DB::DB called at -e line 1

                                                                      
+                         DB<4> &#9785;
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However, if I put these three lines into perl -e or a file and run it, I do not get the warning at all. Strange, huh?

(¹) See perlrun and perlvar.

(²) How do I know what modes lie on a filehandle, anyway? PerlIO::get_layers always just returns qw(unix perlio) which is too little to be possibly true.

(³) Actually I use utf8; and have literal characters in that string instead of \x escaped, but it doesn't matter.

(⁴) And in the cause of that found an orkaround for the problem: binmode Test::More->builder->output, ':utf8';