Use of 'use utf8;' gives me 'Wide character in print'

Question

If I run the following Perl program:

perl -e \'use utf8; print \"鸡\\n\";\'

I get this warning:

Wide character in print at -         


        

Answer 1

You can get close to "just do utf8 everywhere" by using the CPAN module utf8::all.

perl -Mutf8::all -e 'print "鸡\n";'

When print receives something that it can't print (character larger than 255 when no :encoding layer is provided), it assumes you meant to encode it using UTF-8. It does so, after warning about the problem.