http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=961202


in reply to "ISO-8859-1 0x80-0xFF" and chr()

1. chr() returns characeter not bytes.(silly me)

While "bytes" and "characters" is a useful mental image, it's not always correct. The operation defines the context. For example uc interprets a string as text no matter what, whereas print interprets a string as bytes (if it can)

The real problem is that the byte 0xe9 cannot be decoded as UTF-8, because it isn't UTF-8. Either do nothing with it (which works on sufficiently modern perls), or decode it as Latin-1, because Latin-1 (aka ISO-8859-1) maps each byte exactly to the same codepoint number.

Note that instead of calling encode() on each output string, you can also set an IO layer which does it automatically:

binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';

Or on the command line, you can set that up with the -C option:

$ perl -CS -wE 'say chr hex "E9"' é

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Re^2: "ISO-8859-1 0x80-0xFF" and chr()
by remiah (Hermit) on Mar 24, 2012 at 04:16 UTC

    Thanks for reply, moritz.

    I was careless for "utf8" and "UTF-8" before I read that document. moritz seems to be careful person. And -CS option very usuful.