Ok, you probably mean that some UTF-8 multi-bytes characters (i.e. non-ASCII-7bit characters) are maped to Latin-1 single-bytes encoding

Yes, character mappings are Latin-1 (though I think it's actually CP-1252) by default. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

You're thinking of that wrong; it could be a UTF character string, or a UTF-8 byte string.

An essential point, from my perspective, in understanding Unicode is making a differentiation between characters and particular encodings of characters; the difference between Unicode/UTF and UTF-8 (or UCS-2 or UTF-EBCDIC or...). The character string doesn't change when the string is upgraded to internal UTF encoding, even though the byte literals do. But this is largely a semantic argument.

before syswrite to raw filehandle

The use of a raw filehandle for output of non-binary data is what throws me in all this. I don't know your particular application, but it seems much more natural to filter for non-ASCII characters by filtering for non-ASCII characters. You can even do better if you are concerned about corrupted data by excluding most control characters:

if ($string =~ /[^\x{9}\x{10}\x{13}\x{20}-\x{126}]/) {
    # someone messed up
}
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.