Add the encoding pragma to control the "upgrade"

from the native eight bit data to Unicode.

TODO: \x.. and \0... literals.  \N{}.  chr()? ord()?

p4raw-id: //depot/perl@12750

2 files changed, 10 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/pod/perlunicode.pod b/pod/perlunicode.pod
index 0b52afa808..9205fdf77c 100644
--- a/pod/perlunicode.pod
+++ b/pod/perlunicode.pod
@@ -102,10 +102,11 @@ literal UTF-8 string constant in the program), character semantics
 apply; otherwise, byte semantics are in effect.  To force byte semantics
 on Unicode data, the C<bytes> pragma should be used.
 
-Notice that if you have a string with byte semantics and you then
-add character data into it, the bytes will be upgraded I<as if they
-were ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)> (or if in EBCDIC, after a translation
-to ISO 8859-1).
+Notice that if you concatenate strings with byte semantics and strings
+with Unicode character data, the bytes will by default be upgraded
+I<as if they were ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1)> (or if in EBCDIC, after a
+translation to ISO 8859-1).  To change this, use the C<encoding>
+pragma, see L<encoding>.
 
 Under character semantics, many operations that formerly operated on
 bytes change to operating on characters.  For ASCII data this makes no
diff --git a/pod/perlvar.pod b/pod/perlvar.pod
index 64fc7fd654..d34daa6580 100644
--- a/pod/perlvar.pod
+++ b/pod/perlvar.pod
@@ -654,6 +654,11 @@ status; see L<perlvms/$?> for details.
 
 Also see L<Error Indicators>.
 
+=item ${^ENCODING}
+
+The encoding used to interpret native eight-bit encodings to Unicode,
+see L<encode>.  An opaque C<Encode::XS> object.
+
 =item $OS_ERROR
 
 =item $ERRNO