Mark Mielke writes: > > My very limited understanding of utf is that unless I specifically > > instruct perl5.6 otherwise, perl5.6 may possibly interpret some of my data > > as meaningful utf thingies and do something I don't expect with it. In > > this case, I want a way to turn off utf interpretation without having to > > understand in any detail whatsoever what it is, other than that it could > > wreck my data. > > Here we have a case of not understanding, and you shouldn't use it. > > This is all supposed to Work The Right Way. Ilya had to fight many > battles to get people to understand this, which is what Larry was > referring too. I think that Andy is more correct here (in being afraid) than your optimistic position. The moment the information *is* read correctly from the outside word, your optimistic position is completely applicable. However, somebody *should* inform Perl that *this particular filehandle* is accessing a file which contains a sequence of octets. All that "my" approach achieves is it concentrates all these hard decisions into one place: i/o operations (in the wider sense). (As opposed to deciding whether the argument is an octet or a char each time you write a line of Perl code.) But the decision during i/o should be made anyway. Ilya