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Old 6th May 2008
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lvlamb lvlamb is offline
Real Name: Louis V. Lambrecht
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Assumption is the mother of all f*ck-ups. So I'll be cautious.
I did not checked every version or revision of the installed Perl on every OS but I am pretty sure that every maintainer has faced encoding problems and made attempts to correct them. Basically, check resulting code for the encodings and don't google for answers.

In theory, Perl works in UTF-8 unless told not to do so (unless defaulted otherwise at compile time ). Perl will default to UTF-8 in a nearby revision. Unless too many users complain.

So, I assume Perl is UTF-8 default.

Note that, since WinXP(ntfs) for one, since April last year for Linux, late to the party OpenSolaris,the defaults there are UTF-8.

I assume *BSD users are smart enough to modify their application to display UTF-8 encodings when needed. I would use UTF-8 defaults and only translate to 8859-1 for mails sent to mailing lists as you always will be called names when not writing pure ASCII-7 and in English

Part of the base xorg, you now have luit (man luit) to play with filters.

Fwiw, here is a Sun doc that gives some tips on locale/UTF-8 conversions.
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819...3aglffe?a=view

This does not answer your question
IMVHO, using UTF-8 throughout will be correctly read by most applications (hence users).
It is up to the application to correctly translate the encodings, i.e.: use MIME flags.
Most files don't have MIME flags. There is IMHO the error. Much simpler to implement than making the whole OS UTF-8 compliant. Which is changing a bad to a worse. UTF-8 is not an universal encoding either.
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