Perhaps it will help to systematize things a bit. Text can come to your program from various sources:

1) String literals in the source code. Solution: put use utf8 on top of all your files.

2) Files/sockets that you open (or that are opened for you, like STDIN). Solution: binmode, or open my $fh, '<:encoding(utf-8)', $name.

3) Various system messages, errors and the like, such as $! (as in open my $fh, '<', $name or die $!. The $! gives you the output of C's strerror(), a string that contains who-knows-what in unspecified encoding... Once upon a time perl liked to double encode such things but I think it doesn't anymore?

4) Modules, written by other people. This is the real problem. There is no solution. You need to read the documentation (or the source code) and do the right thing.

Thus, there is no super-switch. It would be good if there was, but there isn't. utf8:all helps with the first 3 problems, but it doesn't do anything with the 4th. Use Devel::Peek for debugging, unfortunately, that's still the best thing there is.

---

---

• 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.