On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 10:40:30AM +1300, Sam Vilain wrote:
> Ken Williams wrote:
> >
> >On Mar 2, 2005, at 5:53 PM, Linda W wrote:
> >
> >>I'm not sure what perl does with invalid
> >>character data in a variable when you try to manipulate
> >>it by appending it to another value.
> >
> >
> >There's no such thing as invalid character data in Perl strings. Perl
> >strings can contain arbitrary binary data.
>
> Sure, in the "C" locale.
>
> Outside of that, all bets are off. You could quite easily have arbitrary
> binary data in a Perl scalar that isn't valid character data in UTF-8,
> for instance.
>
> Sam.
..but that has nothing to do with how perl operates on scalars.
Perl will gladly append anything to anything. Whether or not that pops out
correctly or not in your favorite encoding has no effect on the perl
behavior. That was the gist of the original question, as I read it.
If you are using some sort of encoding module you should check the
documentation for the module to see what it does with invalid data, as there
is no such thing natively.
Austin
