So I have a simple perl script (which coincidentally implements the
RC4 cipher).
So if you do "man perlunicode" it says your pre 5.6 scripts should
basically work as is.
However I'm finding in practice the simplest concievable example
doesn't work, viz:
% perl --version
This is perl, v5.8.0 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
[...]
% perl -e 'print chr(255)' | od -tx1
0000000 c3 bf
which is plain wrong! It should output ff.
The same happens for any byte over 127.
So then there is the bytes pragma which is supposed to force
everything to bytes, which also seems plain broken, viz:
% perl -e 'use bytes; print chr(255)' | od -tx1
0000000 c3 bf
WTF?
Am I misunderstanding something about this "transparent" unicode, or
did all the perl scripts on the planet that used binary data just stop
working?
Adam
