Overload stringification and the utf8 flag

Question

There is something I don't understand about overloading stringification and how it interacts with the utf8 flag.

For example the following code prints:

n is utf8 at ./test_stringify_utf8.pl line 46.
$t->{name} is utf8 at ./test_stringify_utf8.pl line 47.
t is not utf8 at ./test_stringify_utf8.pl line 48.
Derviş
t is utf8 at ./test_stringify_utf8.pl line 50.

If I remove say $t, the last line of output would also be t is not utf8

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use utf8;
use Encode qw/is_utf8/;
use strict;

use Modern::Perl '2013';

package Test;
use strict;

sub new {
    my ($class, $name) = @_;

    my $self = { name => $name };
    bless $self, $class;

    return $self;
}

BEGIN {
    my %OVERLOADS = (fallback => 1);

    $OVERLOADS{'""'} = 'to_string';

    use overload;
    overload->import(%OVERLOADS);
}

sub to_string { shift->{name} }


package main;

my $n = "Derviş";
my $t = Test->new($n);

binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";

is_utf8($n)         ? warn "n is utf8"          : warn "n is not utf8";
is_utf8($t->{name}) ? warn '$t->{name} is utf8' : warn '$t->{name} is not utf8';
is_utf8($t)         ? warn "t is utf8"          : warn "t is not utf8";
say $t;
is_utf8($t) ? warn "t is utf8" : warn "t is not utf8";

Answer 1

Overloaded stringification can return a different string every time it's called, so you're trying to find the storage format of a string that doesn't even exist yet. When you stringify the object, the UTF8 flag of the reference is updated to reflect the UTF8 of the stringified object.

"".$t would also work where you used say $t;.