Your graphic is really helpful to understand how the encode works on Perl

you has been really clear, just one more thing, if a want to print using iso-8859-1 it could be possible downgrading, because it changes the internal encoding to this last one and when I print the string (in normal case), i'll have an iso-8859-1 text in the output, isn't it?

I was checked, the examples, and I performed other test using the graphic like downgrading, but i couldn't print the original (U+201C, LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK), thinking, I see that it's not representing in the iso-8859-1 charset, but I found different issues regarding that:

1- If I downgrade the string, perl dies with a message that has wide characters and I guest, that's important becouse in other case it could be cut the internal string without notice, in fact, we can check if it's downgradeable or not using:

my $str = "This's a \x{201c}test\x{201d}";
unless (utf8::downgrade($str, 1)) {
  die "Isn't downgradable\n";
}
[download]

2- using :encoding on an output stream i can see two notice in this case, about perl can't map to iso-8859-1 but in the output appear the unmapped character as an string like \x{201c}.

3- using Encode::encode the unmapped character is printed as an ? question symbol and not report any notice

Thank you so much, is a great explanation