Re: restore unicode data from database?

[graff]

The man page for the "Encode" module in Perl 5.8.0 points out the following, under the heading "The UTF-8 flag", sub-heading "Messing with Perl's internals":

         The following API uses parts of Perl's internals in the
         current implementation.  As such, they are efficient but
         may change.

         ...

         _utf8_on(STRING)
           [INTERNAL] Turns on the UTF-8 flag in STRING.  The
           data in STRING is not checked for being well-formed
           UTF-8.  Do not use unless you know that the STRING is
           well-formed UTF-8.  Returns the previous state of the
           UTF-8 flag (so please don't treat the return value as
           indicating success or failure), or "undef" if STRING
           is not a string.

I'm not saying that this is a good alternative to the work-around that you are already using. I have a hunch that anything else, that would actually treat the RDBM as a utf-8 source, would require mucking with the DBD or Tie:RDBM module internals, and would be problematic, since a database (and any interface to it) needs to be flexible about handling many types of non-ASCII data -- not just unicode characters.

Personally, I'd be content with the method you are already using.