While striving for Unicode enlightenment, meditate on this mantra: "Decode everything you receive, encode everything you send out. (If it's text data.)" It's not the totality of wisdom, but as its layers of meaning dawn, you will see it contains 90% of what you need to know.

I agree, and from the description it sound as if rduke15 is actually doing that. Since Latin-1 is the default encoding, not doing anything with the input should be the as decoding as Latin-1 ... except that in older versions of Perl, it's sometimes not.

I'm also intrigued by the description of the local having influence on the result. If I understood the documentation correctly, locales shouldn't have an effect unless you explicitly use locale. Is that correct?

Still I have observed that it does have an effect, though I've never been able to put my finger on what exactly is going on when a non-UTF8 local comes into play.