Re^4: Default encoding rules leave me puzzled... (use open qw/ :std :locale /;

[kzwix]

I'm sorry, but I think that your "Perl tries to not convert anything at all, automatically" statement is wrong.
I mean, else, why would a string internally stored as UTF-8 be converted to Latin-1 when sent to the standard output ?
(That is, without having used any funny encoding/decoding/layer stuff...)

[moritz]

It's your use utf8; statement that explicitly converts the source code to perl's internal format, which happens to be latin-1 in this case. The output operation then doesn't convert anything. Maybe I should have said that no implicit conversion takes place, because I don't coutn the use utf8; as automatic/implicit.

[ikegami]

I mean, else, why would a string internally stored as UTF-8 be converted to Latin-1 when sent to the standard output ?

Because you are printing the string, not its internal representation. The layout of a scalar is irrelevant.