NAME

       encoding::warnings - Warn on implicit encoding conversions

VERSION

       This document describes version 0.13 of encoding::warnings, released June 20, 2016.

NOTICE

       As of Perl 5.26.0, this module has no effect.  The internal Perl feature that was used to
       implement this module has been removed.  In recent years, much work has been done on the
       Perl core to eliminate discrepancies in the treatment of upgraded versus downgraded
       strings.  In addition, the encoding pragma, which caused many of the problems, is no
       longer supported.  Thus, the warnings this module produced are no longer necessary.

       Hence, if you load this module on Perl 5.26.0, you will get one warning that the module is
       no longer supported; and the module will do nothing thereafter.

SYNOPSIS

           use encoding::warnings; # or 'FATAL' to raise fatal exceptions

           utf8::encode($a = chr(20000));  # a byte-string (raw bytes)
           $b = chr(20000);                # a unicode-string (wide characters)

           # "Bytes implicitly upgraded into wide characters as iso-8859-1"
           $c = $a . $b;

DESCRIPTION

   Overview of the problem
       By default, there is a fundamental asymmetry in Perl's unicode model: implicit upgrading
       from byte-strings to unicode-strings assumes that they were encoded in ISO 8859-1
       (Latin-1), but unicode-strings are downgraded with UTF-8 encoding.  This happens because
       the first 256 codepoints in Unicode happens to agree with Latin-1.

       However, this silent upgrading can easily cause problems, if you happen to mix unicode
       strings with non-Latin1 data -- i.e. byte-strings encoded in UTF-8 or other encodings.
       The error will not manifest until the combined string is written to output, at which time
       it would be impossible to see where did the silent upgrading occur.

   Detecting the problem
       This module simplifies the process of diagnosing such problems.  Just put this line on top
       of your main program:

           use encoding::warnings;

       Afterwards, implicit upgrading of high-bit bytes will raise a warning.  Ex.: "Bytes
       implicitly upgraded into wide characters as iso-8859-1 at - line 7".

       However, strings composed purely of ASCII code points (0x00..0x7F) will not trigger this
       warning.

       You can also make the warnings fatal by importing this module as:

           use encoding::warnings 'FATAL';

   Solving the problem
       Most of the time, this warning occurs when a byte-string is concatenated with a unicode-
       string.  There are a number of ways to solve it:

       •   Upgrade both sides to unicode-strings

           If your program does not need compatibility for Perl 5.6 and earlier, the recommended
           approach is to apply appropriate IO disciplines, so all data in your program become
           unicode-strings.  See encoding, open and "binmode" in perlfunc for how.

       •   Downgrade both sides to byte-strings

           The other way works too, especially if you are sure that all your data are under the
           same encoding, or if compatibility with older versions of Perl is desired.

           You may downgrade strings with "Encode::encode" and "utf8::encode".  See Encode and
           utf8 for details.

       •   Specify the encoding for implicit byte-string upgrading

           If you are confident that all byte-strings will be in a specific encoding like UTF-8,
           and need not support older versions of Perl, use the "encoding" pragma:

               use encoding 'utf8';

           Similarly, this will silence warnings from this module, and preserve the default
           behaviour:

               use encoding 'iso-8859-1';

           However, note that "use encoding" actually had three distinct effects:

           •   PerlIO layers for STDIN and STDOUT

               This is similar to what open pragma does.

           •   Literal conversions

               This turns all literal string in your program into unicode-strings (equivalent to
               a "use utf8"), by decoding them using the specified encoding.

           •   Implicit upgrading for byte-strings

               This will silence warnings from this module, as shown above.

           Because literal conversions also work on empty strings, it may surprise some people:

               use encoding 'big5';

               my $byte_string = pack("C*", 0xA4, 0x40);
               print length $a;    # 2 here.
               $a .= "";           # concatenating with a unicode string...
               print length $a;    # 1 here!

           In other words, do not "use encoding" unless you are certain that the program will not
           deal with any raw, 8-bit binary data at all.

           However, the "Filter => 1" flavor of "use encoding" will not affect implicit upgrading
           for byte-strings, and is thus incapable of silencing warnings from this module.  See
           encoding for more details.

CAVEATS

       For Perl 5.9.4 or later, this module's effect is lexical.

       For Perl versions prior to 5.9.4, this module affects the whole script, instead of inside
       its lexical block.

SEE ALSO

       perlunicode, perluniintro

       open, utf8, encoding, Encode

AUTHORS

       Audrey Tang

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 by Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>.

       This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same
       terms as Perl itself.

       See <http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html>