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I have some perl5.6/5.004 scripts that I need to get quickly to work for
perl5.8. Is there an easy way to disable Unicode handling for a whole
script?

I've tried to insert
BEGIN { delete @ENV{qw(LANGUAGE LC_ALL LANG)}; }
use bytes;
but apparently Unicode mode is invoked before the script unsets those
variables. Besides, even if it worked I'd be nervous about not catching
all variables that can cause Unicode mode -- I need to be quite sure
Perl won't turn on Unicode mode because someone set a variable I didn't
know about.

--
Hallvard