1Locale::Recode(3)     User Contributed Perl Documentation    Locale::Recode(3)
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NAME

6       Locale::Recode - Object-Oriented Portable Charset Conversion
7

SYNOPSIS

9         use Locale::Recode;
10
11         $cd = Locale::Recode->new (from => 'UTF-8',
12                                    to   => 'ISO-8859-1');
13
14         die $cd->getError if $cd->getError;
15
16         $cd->recode ($text) or die $cd->getError;
17
18         $mime_name = Locale::Recode->resolveAlias ('latin-1');
19
20         $supported = Locale::Recode->getSupported;
21
22         $complete = Locale::Recode->getCharsets;
23

DESCRIPTION

25       This module provides routines that convert textual data from one
26       codeset to another in a portable way.  The module has been started
27       before Encode(3) was written.  It's main purpose today is to provide
28       charset conversion even when Encode(3) is not available on the system.
29       It should also work for older Perl versions without Unicode support.
30
31       Internally Locale::Recode(3) will use Encode(3) whenever possible, to
32       allow for a faster conversion and for a wider range of supported
33       charsets, and will only fall back to the Perl implementation when
34       Encode(3) is not available or does not support a particular charset
35       that Locale::Recode(3) does.
36
37       Locale::Recode(3) is part of libintl-perl, and it's main purpose is
38       actually to implement a portable charset conversion framework for the
39       message translation facilities described in Locale::TextDomain(3).
40

CONSTRUCTOR

42       The constructor "new()" requires two named arguments:
43
44       from
45           The encoding of the original data.  Case doesn't matter, aliases
46           are resolved.
47
48       to  The target encoding.  Again, case doesn't matter, and aliases are
49           resolved.
50
51       The constructor will never fail.  In case of an error, the object's
52       internal state is set to bad and it will refuse to do any conversions.
53       You can inquire the reason for the failure with the method getError().
54

OBJECT METHODS

56       The following object methods are available.
57
58       recode (STRING)
59           Converts STRING from the source encoding into the destination
60           encoding.  In case of success, a truth value is returned, false
61           otherwise.  You can inquire the reason for the failure with the
62           method getError().
63
64       getError
65           Returns either false if the object is not in an error state or an
66           error message.
67

CLASS METHODS

69       The object provides some additional class methods:
70
71       getSupported
72           Returns a reference to a list of all supported charsets.  This may
73           implicitely load additional Encode(3) conversions like
74           Encode::HanExtra(3) which may produce considerable load on your
75           system.
76
77           The method is therefore not intended for regular use but rather for
78           getting resp. displaying once a list of available encodings.
79
80           The members of the list are all converted to uppercase!
81
82       getCharsets
83           Like getSupported() but also returns all available aliases.
84

SUPPORTED CHARSETS

86       The range of supported charsets is system-dependent.  The following
87       somewhat special charsets are always available:
88
89       UTF-8
90           UTF-8 is available independently of your Perl version.  For Perl
91           5.6 or better or in the presence of Encode(3), conversions are not
92           done in Perl but with the interfaces provided by these facilities
93           which are written in C, hence much faster.
94
95           Encoding data into UTF-8 is fast, even if it is done in Perl.
96           Decoding it in Perl may become quite slow.  If you frequently have
97           to decode UTF-8 with Locale::Recode you will probably want to make
98           sure that you do that with Perl 5.6 or beter, or install Encode(3)
99           to speed up things.
100
101       INTERNAL
102           UTF-8 is fast to write but hard to read for applications.  It is
103           therefore not the worst for internal string representation but not
104           far from that.  Locale::Recode(3) stores strings internally as a
105           reference to an array of integer values like most programming
106           languages (Perl is an exception) do, trading memory for
107           performance.
108
109           The integer values are the UCS-4 codes of the characters in host
110           byte order.
111
112           The encoding INTERNAL is directly availabe via Locale::Recode(3)
113           but of course you should not really use it for data exchange,
114           unless you know what you are doing.
115
116       Locale::Recode(3) has native support for a plethora of other encodings,
117       most of them 8 bit encodings that are fast to decode, including most
118       encodings used on popular micros like the ISO-8859-* series of
119       encodings, most Windows-* encodings (also known as CP*), Macintosh,
120       Atari, etc.
121

NAMES AND ALIASES

123       Each charset resp. encoding is available internally under a unique
124       name.  Whenever the information was available, the preferred MIME name
125       (see <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/>) was chosen as
126       the internal name.
127
128       Alias handling is quite strict.  The module does not make wild guesses
129       at what you mean ("What's the meaning of the acronym JIS" is a valid
130       alias for "7bit-jis" in Encode(3) ....) but aims at providing common
131       aliases only.  The same applies to so-called aliases that are really
132       mistakes, like "utf8" for UTF-8.
133
134       The module knows all aliases that are listed with the IANA character
135       set registry (<http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/>), plus
136       those known to libiconv version 1.8, and a bunch of additional ones.
137

CONVERSION TABLES

139       The conversion tables have either been taken from official sources like
140       the IANA or the Unicode Consortium, from Bruno Haible's libiconv, or
141       from the sources of the GNU libc and the regression tests for libintl-
142       perl will check for conformance here.  For some encodings this data
143       differs from Encode(3)'s data which would cause these tests to fail.
144       In these cases, the module will not invoke the Encode(3) methods, but
145       will fall back to the internal implementation for the sake of
146       consistency.
147
148       The few encodings that are affected are so simple that you will not
149       experience any real performance penalty unless you convert large chunks
150       of data.  But the package is not really intended for such use anyway,
151       and since Encode(3) is relatively new, I rather think that the
152       differences are bugs in Encode which will be fixed soon.
153

BUGS

155       The module should provide fall back conversions for other Unicode
156       encoding schemes like UCS-2, UCS-4 (big- and little-endian).
157
158       The pure Perl UTF-8 decoder will not always handle corrupt UTF-8
159       correctly, especially at the end and at the beginning of the string.
160       This is not likely to be fixed, since the module's intention is not to
161       be a consistency checker for UTF-8 data.
162

AUTHOR

164       Copyright (C) 2002-2009, Guido Flohr <guido@imperia.net>, all rights
165       reserved.  See the source code for details.
166
167       This software is contributed to the Perl community by Imperia
168       (<http://www.imperia.net/>).
169

SEE ALSO

171       Encode(3), iconv(3), iconv(1), recode(1), perl(1)
172

POD ERRORS

174       Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained
175       below:
176
177       Around line 369:
178           =cut found outside a pod block.  Skipping to next block.
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182perl v5.10.1                      2010-08-21                 Locale::Recode(3)
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