Re: 5.8, NLS_LANG, and the utf8 flag

[Kevin Scaldeferri]

Tim Vorce wrote:
> It is my impression that the utf flag isn't set unless you explicitly set it.  That 
>seems to impact program stuff rather than data, and that may best be set by the 
>statement
> use utf8;
> 

In Perl 5.8, 'use utf8' is 99% no-op.  It is documented as only being 
necessary to recognize utf8 literals in your source code.  You should 
never need 'use utf8' anymore to handle data.

It seems dramatically wrong for bytes known to be utf8 to be passed 
without the utf8 bit set.  It requires people to manually correct all 
uses like:

while ($sth->fetch()) {
   if ($ENV{'NLS_LANG') =~ /UTF8$/) {
     Encode::_utf8_on($result);
   }
   ...
}