> Here's a patch I added against plperl, originally against beta5, now

> Here's a patch I added against plperl, originally against beta5, now
> against rc1. It simply checks with GetDatabaseEncoding() if the current
> database is in UTF-8, and if so, sets the UTF-8 flag on the arguments
> that are passed to perl. This means that it isn't necessary to
> utf8::upgrade() every string, as perl has no way of knowing offhand
> that a string is UTF-8 -- but postgres does, because the database
> encoding is specified, so it makes sense to turn the flag on. You
> should also be able to properly manipulate UTF-8 strings now from
> plperl as opposed to plperlu, because otherwise you'd have to use
> encoding 'utf8' which was not allowed. It could also eliminate some
> unexpected bugs if you assume that perl knows the string is unicode.
It
> is enabled only for perl 5.6 and higher, so earlier versions will not
> be affected.
>
> I have been assured by crab that the patch is quite harmless and will
> not break anything. It would be great to see it in 8 final! :-)

David Kamholz