Re: [tlug] unicode and Perl- how to pass command line unicodearguments

[Ian Wells <ijw@example.com>]

On 13/02/06, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:

It's probably possible to program in this style in Perl, too, but Perl
believes that anything that can't be implicit should be made so
obscure that it might as well be implicit---it won't be pleasant. ;-)

Seems unnecessarily complicated to worry about which type your variable is like that. 

Perl just says 'a string is a string of numbers' - its internal representation might use utf8 as a compression mechanism, but ultimately it hides it from you.  You still need to decide what's in your variable (raw utf8 as a bytestring, unpicked utf8 as a char-string) but only when you're doing something unusual - generally, with utf8 set on your filehandles, everything works without having to think about it (and certainly without deciding whether every string has to be utf8 or not, which seems to be the implication of what you're saying about Python).

Works in my head, anyway.  Admittedly, I've never seen anyone pass unicode parameters before, so that's a new problem...

--
Ian.