Follow up: Hi All,
Once JJ agreed this was a bug and it got posted, the developers ran with it and even created a new class to handle the problem. https://github.com/Raku/doc/pull/3171#issuecomment-575991403 # class CArray multi new (Str $data , :$encoding = 'utf8') { self.new($data.encode($encoding).list, 0) } Wow! Better than I had even hoped for! Awesome! -T
