I can't find a basic description of how string data is stored in Perl! Its like all the documentation is assuming I already know this for some reason. I know about encode(), decode(), and I know I can read raw bytes into a Perl "string" and output them again without Perl screwing with them. I know about open modes. I also gather Perl must use some interal format to store character strings and can differentiate between character and binary data. Please where is this documented???
Equivalent question is; given this perl:
$x = decode($y);
Decode to WHAT and from WHAT??
As far as I can figure there must be a flag on the string data structure that says this is binary XOR character data (of some internal format which BTW is a superset of Unicode -http://perldoc.perl.org/Encode.html#DESCRIPTION). But I'd like it if that were stated in the docs or confirmed/discredited here.