We had talked here and there about how we needed to document the safe way to deal with strings, which became an issue with the introduction of COW. Leaving aside anything else, I wanted to point the list at a post by Dave M., which may have gone unnoticed because of its super-duper not-very-inviting subject line of: Re: [#116407]: SvPVutf8 != SvPVX, and sv_2pvutf8 Or something much like that. You can find the text here, with a must-read follow-up immediately following: https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=116407#txn-1215531 -- rjbsThread Next