How has support for binmode and encodings changed across recent Perl versions?

Support for binmode and encodings in Perl has evolved across various versions, enhancing the ability to handle different character encodings and binary data effectively. From Perl 5.8 onwards, significant improvements were made, particularly in the areas of UTF-8 support and the introduction of the use utf8 pragma, which allows source files to be written in UTF-8.

Recent versions of Perl have continued to refine these features, allowing for more seamless handling of multi-byte characters and improved integration with I/O operations. The introduction of the :encoding layer and the binmode function has simplified the process for developers working with files of various encodings.

Here's a simple example of using binmode with UTF-8 encoding in Perl:

open(my $fh, '>', 'output.txt') or die "Could not open file: $!";
binmode($fh, ':encoding(UTF-8)');
print $fh "Hello, world in UTF-8!\n";
close($fh);