in reply to Re^2: why no default unicode?
in thread why no default unicode?

Read the linked documentation. If you don't want open to default to utf-8, then set PERL5OPT='-CS'

As for auto-detecting. There is no way for perl (or any other language) to determine the difference between an input file containing utf-8, and an input file containing arbitrary binary.

Indeed, there is no way to distinguish between utf-8 and utf-2 or utf-32 or arbitrary binary. In this respect the entire unicode standard is terminally broken.

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