Re: Explaining this behavior (was Re: good name for characters matching [^\0-\377]?)

E R skribis 2007-10-22  7:01 (-0500):
> So this raises another interesting point... not only must
> Encode::encode et al. perform the proper encoding (as in translations
> to character ordinals), but they also must return a Perl string whose
> internal representation is, shall we say, the "conventional" one, i.e.
> one octet per Perl character.
> I'm sure this is already well understood, but it is interesting to
> come to this conclusion.

There's an alternative way of viewing this: there are two types of
strings: binary and text. If you encode text, you get binary.

While in practice there is only one string type, and there's no way for
perl internals to know if a certain string is binary or
text-that-is-encoded-as-latin1-internally, it can help to think of
things in terms of the following picture:
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=645432
-- 
Met vriendelijke groet,  Kind regards,  Korajn salutojn,

  Juerd Waalboer:  Perl hacker  <#####@juerd.nl>  <http://juerd.nl/sig>
  Convolution:     ICT solutions and consultancy <[email protected]>