Question

Are decoded strings without additional attributes and Unicode interchangeable?

Update:

Does it make a difference if I write

subroutine expects decoded strings.

or write

subroutine expects Unicode strings.

?

sub subroutine {
    my $unicode = shift;
    utf8::upgrade( $unicode );
    my $gcs = Unicode::GCString->new( $unicode );
    my $colwidth = $gcs->columns();
    return $colwidth;
}

Answer 1

Assuming we are talking about decoding a character encoding (UTF-8, cp1252, etc), yes.

Encode’s decode produces a string of Unicode code points. “Unicode string” is a fitting description of the result.

Note that “Unicode string” is not an fitting alternative to “strings stored using the UTF8=1 format”. Unlike the strings returned by decode, a string stored using the UTF8=1 format is not necessarily a string of Unicode code points.