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Postings from July 2017
Currently, when an attempt is made to print a non-Latin-1 character to a byte-oriented stream, the entire string containing that character is output nevertheless, implicitly UTF-8 encoded. I think we should deprecate this behaviour, ultimately making this situation signal an exception. The current behaviour cannot be used to get consistent encoding from a Perl program. UTF-8 encoding is of course often useful, but because the implicit encoding is only triggered if there's actually a non-Latin-1 character in the string, the actual encoding of the output varies in a significant manner between non-ASCII Latin-1 strings and non-Latin-1 strings. So different program runs produce incompatibly-encoded output. In fact, because the encoding decision is made per argument, the output from a single program run, and even a single print statement, can be self-inconsistent. This is not useful behaviour. The inconsistency is misleading. It adds to the difficulty that we can't avoid around the aliasing of bytes and Latin-1 characters. We've had at least one bug report from a user who was very confused about encoding because encoded and decoded forms of a string would print out identically for him. (The `bug' was that encoded and decoded strings got concatenated, causing them to be output with consistent encoding that made them appear different.) -zeframThread Next