To avoid problems with utf8- and latin1- behaviour on other systems, I intend to create a (few) CPAN module(s) which will make pre-configured encodings "perl native" (not really, of course, this will be perl modules, not XS). The basic idea is to autoload some default encodings via the PERL5OPT variable:
PERL5OPT=-MEncode::Default [=TERM,cp850,FILE,windows-1252,...] This way, every one will be able to make one or more encodings default. It will also be possible to work around the problems with different codepages for files and terminals on Windows systems, to set special encodings for sockets and to use perl scripts written in non-ascii charsets. If there are any interest, I will probably post theese four modules on CPAN: Encode::Default - Use default encodings for files and terminals Encode::Std - Unconfigured version of Encode::Default (override default) Encode::Default::Win32 - Autoselection of codepages by Encode::Default Decode::Source - Filter for scripts written in other encodings than utf8 Most of the work is done and tested on PC/Windows, and partially on Cygwin. Are there any interest of this? // Magnus