Is there a difference between “utf8::upgrade” and “is_utf8/decode 'latin1'”?

Question

Do these two code snippets the same thing?

utf8::upgrade( $s );

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use Encode qw(is_utf8 decode);

$s = is_utf8( $s ) ? $s : decode( 'latin1', $s );

Answer 1

Making a copy and the implications of such aside, they're the same thing, but only because of how decode('latin1', $_) handles invalid latin1 strings such as "\\x90" .

The expression returns something different (number of bytes used internally vs $s ), but I presumed you're discarding that.

I hope you ask because you want to replace the latter with the former!