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  some confusion on what these do, so here is a short comparison:
  
  C<utf8> controls whether the JSON text created by C<encode> (and expected
  by C<decode>) is UTF-8 encoded or not, while C<latin1> and C<ascii> only
  control whether C<encode> escapes character values outside their respective
  codeset range. Neither of these flags conflict with each other, although
  some combinations make less sense than others.
  
  Care has been taken to make all flags symmetrical with respect to
  C<encode> and C<decode>, that is, texts encoded with any combination of
  these flag values will be correctly decoded when the same flags are used
  - in general, if you use different flag settings while encoding vs. when
  decoding you likely have a bug somewhere.
  
  Below comes a verbose discussion of these flags. Note that a "codeset" is
  simply an abstract set of character-codepoint pairs, while an encoding
  takes those codepoint numbers and I<encodes> them, in our case into
  octets. Unicode is (among other things) a codeset, UTF-8 is an encoding,
  and ISO-8859-1 (= latin 1) and ASCII are both codesets I<and> encodings at
  the same time, which can be confusing.
  
  =over 4
  
  =item C<utf8> flag disabled
  
  When C<utf8> is disabled (the default), then C<encode>/C<decode> generate
  and expect Unicode strings, that is, characters with high ordinal Unicode
  values (> 255) will be encoded as such characters, and likewise such
  characters are decoded as-is, no changes to them will be done, except
  "(re-)interpreting" them as Unicode codepoints or Unicode characters,
  respectively (to Perl, these are the same thing in strings unless you do
  funny/weird/dumb stuff).
  
  This is useful when you want to do the encoding yourself (e.g. when you
  want to have UTF-16 encoded JSON texts) or when some other layer does
  the encoding for you (for example, when printing to a terminal using a
  filehandle that transparently encodes to UTF-8 you certainly do NOT want
  to UTF-8 encode your data first and have Perl encode it another time).