Re: Interpretation of non-UTF8 strings

> It only works for UTF-8, not for other encodings (perl-5.8.4):

As documented and intended.

> $ perl -C -e 'print chr(0x104), "\n"'
> Wide character in print at -e line 1.
> [gibberish output, UTF-8-reinterpreted-as-ISO-8859-2]
> 
> The default encoding (of the locale and of the terminal) is ISO-8859-2,
> which *is* capable of representing U+0104.

perl -Mencoding=latin2 -e 'print chr(0x104), "\n"'

gives you what you want.

> In summary, some parts of Perl treat non-UTF-8 scalars as ISO-8859-1,
> while others treat is as whatever is expected by default in files and
> filenames and commandline (the locale tells what it is). It should be
> decided one way or the other, otherwise generic code doesn't know how to
> interpret Perl scalars it encounters.

"generic code"?  If you mean Perl, you can use utf8::is_utf8().  If you
mean XS, you can use SvUTF8().

-- 
Jarkko Hietaniemi <[email protected]> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special
biologist word we use for 'stable'.  It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen