That's how I understand it, but it doesn't always work. I've brought it up in other newsgroups and am told that strings will eventually be stored "transparantly" but it will still handle binary data OK, though I can't really get a better answer than that.

Currently you need use utf8 in the scope of the regex to enable certain behavior.

There is also the fact that any particular string may be byte or character encoded, but no function to tell which. A regex on a byte string will work with binary data—no special pragma is needed.

However, use byte and use utf8 are not simple opposites as I had thought from reading those docs. They mean different things, and the real behavior is different from what p5p people tell me.

So, always test it and try it. Unicode support is still "experimental" according to the docs.