1PERLUNIINTRO(1)        Perl Programmers Reference Guide        PERLUNIINTRO(1)
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NAME

6       perluniintro - Perl Unicode introduction
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DESCRIPTION

9       This document gives a general idea of Unicode and how to use Unicode in
10       Perl.  See "Further Resources" for references to more in-depth
11       treatments of Unicode.
12
13   Unicode
14       Unicode is a character set standard which plans to codify all of the
15       writing systems of the world, plus many other symbols.
16
17       Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 are coordinated standards that unify almost
18       all other modern character set standards, covering more than 80 writing
19       systems and hundreds of languages, including all commercially-important
20       modern languages.  All characters in the largest Chinese, Japanese, and
21       Korean dictionaries are also encoded. The standards will eventually
22       cover almost all characters in more than 250 writing systems and
23       thousands of languages.  Unicode 1.0 was released in October 1991, and
24       6.0 in October 2010.
25
26       A Unicode character is an abstract entity.  It is not bound to any
27       particular integer width, especially not to the C language "char".
28       Unicode is language-neutral and display-neutral: it does not encode the
29       language of the text, and it does not generally define fonts or other
30       graphical layout details.  Unicode operates on characters and on text
31       built from those characters.
32
33       Unicode defines characters like "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" or "GREEK
34       SMALL LETTER ALPHA" and unique numbers for the characters, in this case
35       0x0041 and 0x03B1, respectively.  These unique numbers are called code
36       points.  A code point is essentially the position of the character
37       within the set of all possible Unicode characters, and thus in Perl,
38       the term ordinal is often used interchangeably with it.
39
40       The Unicode standard prefers using hexadecimal notation for the code
41       points.  If numbers like 0x0041 are unfamiliar to you, take a peek at a
42       later section, "Hexadecimal Notation".  The Unicode standard uses the
43       notation "U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A", to give the hexadecimal code
44       point and the normative name of the character.
45
46       Unicode also defines various properties for the characters, like
47       "uppercase" or "lowercase", "decimal digit", or "punctuation"; these
48       properties are independent of the names of the characters.
49       Furthermore, various operations on the characters like uppercasing,
50       lowercasing, and collating (sorting) are defined.
51
52       A Unicode logical "character" can actually consist of more than one
53       internal actual "character" or code point.  For Western languages, this
54       is adequately modelled by a base character (like "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
55       A") followed by one or more modifiers (like "COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT").
56       This sequence of base character and modifiers is called a combining
57       character sequence.  Some non-western languages require more
58       complicated models, so Unicode created the grapheme cluster concept,
59       which was later further refined into the extended grapheme cluster.
60       For example, a Korean Hangul syllable is considered a single logical
61       character, but most often consists of three actual Unicode characters:
62       a leading consonant followed by an interior vowel followed by a
63       trailing consonant.
64
65       Whether to call these extended grapheme clusters "characters" depends
66       on your point of view. If you are a programmer, you probably would tend
67       towards seeing each element in the sequences as one unit, or
68       "character".  However from the user's point of view, the whole sequence
69       could be seen as one "character" since that's probably what it looks
70       like in the context of the user's language.  In this document, we take
71       the programmer's point of view: one "character" is one Unicode code
72       point.
73
74       For some combinations of base character and modifiers, there are
75       precomposed characters.  There is a single character equivalent, for
76       example, for the sequence "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" followed by
77       "COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT".  It is called  "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH
78       ACUTE".  These precomposed characters are, however, only available for
79       some combinations, and are mainly meant to support round-trip
80       conversions between Unicode and legacy standards (like ISO 8859).
81       Using sequences, as Unicode does, allows for needing fewer basic
82       building blocks (code points) to express many more potential grapheme
83       clusters.  To support conversion between equivalent forms, various
84       normalization forms are also defined.  Thus, "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
85       WITH ACUTE" is in Normalization Form Composed, (abbreviated NFC), and
86       the sequence "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" followed by "COMBINING ACUTE
87       ACCENT" represents the same character in Normalization Form Decomposed
88       (NFD).
89
90       Because of backward compatibility with legacy encodings, the "a unique
91       number for every character" idea breaks down a bit: instead, there is
92       "at least one number for every character".  The same character could be
93       represented differently in several legacy encodings.  The converse is
94       not true: some code points do not have an assigned character.  Firstly,
95       there are unallocated code points within otherwise used blocks.
96       Secondly, there are special Unicode control characters that do not
97       represent true characters.
98
99       When Unicode was first conceived, it was thought that all the world's
100       characters could be represented using a 16-bit word; that is a maximum
101       of 0x10000 (or 65,536) characters would be needed, from 0x0000 to
102       0xFFFF.  This soon proved to be wrong, and since Unicode 2.0 (July
103       1996), Unicode has been defined all the way up to 21 bits (0x10FFFF),
104       and Unicode 3.1 (March 2001) defined the first characters above 0xFFFF.
105       The first 0x10000 characters are called the Plane 0, or the Basic
106       Multilingual Plane (BMP).  With Unicode 3.1, 17 (yes, seventeen) planes
107       in all were defined--but they are nowhere near full of defined
108       characters, yet.
109
110       When a new language is being encoded, Unicode generally will choose a
111       "block" of consecutive unallocated code points for its characters.  So
112       far, the number of code points in these blocks has always been evenly
113       divisible by 16.  Extras in a block, not currently needed, are left
114       unallocated, for future growth.  But there have been occasions when a
115       later release needed more code points than the available extras, and a
116       new block had to allocated somewhere else, not contiguous to the
117       initial one, to handle the overflow.  Thus, it became apparent early on
118       that "block" wasn't an adequate organizing principle, and so the
119       "Script" property was created.  (Later an improved script property was
120       added as well, the "Script_Extensions" property.)  Those code points
121       that are in overflow blocks can still have the same script as the
122       original ones.  The script concept fits more closely with natural
123       language: there is "Latin" script, "Greek" script, and so on; and there
124       are several artificial scripts, like "Common" for characters that are
125       used in multiple scripts, such as mathematical symbols.  Scripts
126       usually span varied parts of several blocks.  For more information
127       about scripts, see "Scripts" in perlunicode.  The division into blocks
128       exists, but it is almost completely accidental--an artifact of how the
129       characters have been and still are allocated.  (Note that this
130       paragraph has oversimplified things for the sake of this being an
131       introduction.  Unicode doesn't really encode languages, but the writing
132       systems for them--their scripts; and one script can be used by many
133       languages.  Unicode also encodes things that aren't really about
134       languages, such as symbols like "BAGGAGE CLAIM".)
135
136       The Unicode code points are just abstract numbers.  To input and output
137       these abstract numbers, the numbers must be encoded or serialised
138       somehow.  Unicode defines several character encoding forms, of which
139       UTF-8 is the most popular.  UTF-8 is a variable length encoding that
140       encodes Unicode characters as 1 to 4 bytes.  Other encodings include
141       UTF-16 and UTF-32 and their big- and little-endian variants (UTF-8 is
142       byte-order independent).  The ISO/IEC 10646 defines the UCS-2 and UCS-4
143       encoding forms.
144
145       For more information about encodings--for instance, to learn what
146       surrogates and byte order marks (BOMs) are--see perlunicode.
147
148   Perl's Unicode Support
149       Starting from Perl v5.6.0, Perl has had the capacity to handle Unicode
150       natively.  Perl v5.8.0, however, is the first recommended release for
151       serious Unicode work.  The maintenance release 5.6.1 fixed many of the
152       problems of the initial Unicode implementation, but for example regular
153       expressions still do not work with Unicode in 5.6.1.  Perl v5.14.0 is
154       the first release where Unicode support is (almost) seamlessly
155       integratable without some gotchas. (There are a few exceptions.
156       Firstly, some differences in quotemeta were fixed starting in Perl
157       5.16.0. Secondly, some differences in the range operator were fixed
158       starting in Perl 5.26.0. Thirdly, some differences in split were fixed
159       started in Perl 5.28.0.)
160
161       To enable this seamless support, you should "use feature
162       'unicode_strings'" (which is automatically selected if you "use v5.12"
163       or higher).  See feature.  (5.14 also fixes a number of bugs and
164       departures from the Unicode standard.)
165
166       Before Perl v5.8.0, the use of "use utf8" was used to declare that
167       operations in the current block or file would be Unicode-aware.  This
168       model was found to be wrong, or at least clumsy: the "Unicodeness" is
169       now carried with the data, instead of being attached to the operations.
170       Starting with Perl v5.8.0, only one case remains where an explicit "use
171       utf8" is needed: if your Perl script itself is encoded in UTF-8, you
172       can use UTF-8 in your identifier names, and in string and regular
173       expression literals, by saying "use utf8".  This is not the default
174       because scripts with legacy 8-bit data in them would break.  See utf8.
175
176   Perl's Unicode Model
177       Perl supports both pre-5.6 strings of eight-bit native bytes, and
178       strings of Unicode characters.  The general principle is that Perl
179       tries to keep its data as eight-bit bytes for as long as possible, but
180       as soon as Unicodeness cannot be avoided, the data is transparently
181       upgraded to Unicode.  Prior to Perl v5.14.0, the upgrade was not
182       completely transparent (see "The "Unicode Bug"" in perlunicode), and
183       for backwards compatibility, full transparency is not gained unless
184       "use feature 'unicode_strings'" (see feature) or "use v5.12" (or
185       higher) is selected.
186
187       Internally, Perl currently uses either whatever the native eight-bit
188       character set of the platform (for example Latin-1) is, defaulting to
189       UTF-8, to encode Unicode strings. Specifically, if all code points in
190       the string are 0xFF or less, Perl uses the native eight-bit character
191       set.  Otherwise, it uses UTF-8.
192
193       A user of Perl does not normally need to know nor care how Perl happens
194       to encode its internal strings, but it becomes relevant when outputting
195       Unicode strings to a stream without a PerlIO layer (one with the
196       "default" encoding).  In such a case, the raw bytes used internally
197       (the native character set or UTF-8, as appropriate for each string)
198       will be used, and a "Wide character" warning will be issued if those
199       strings contain a character beyond 0x00FF.
200
201       For example,
202
203             perl -e 'print "\x{DF}\n", "\x{0100}\x{DF}\n"'
204
205       produces a fairly useless mixture of native bytes and UTF-8, as well as
206       a warning:
207
208            Wide character in print at ...
209
210       To output UTF-8, use the ":encoding" or ":utf8" output layer.
211       Prepending
212
213             binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
214
215       to this sample program ensures that the output is completely UTF-8, and
216       removes the program's warning.
217
218       You can enable automatic UTF-8-ification of your standard file handles,
219       default "open()" layer, and @ARGV by using either the "-C" command line
220       switch or the "PERL_UNICODE" environment variable, see perlrun for the
221       documentation of the "-C" switch.
222
223       Note that this means that Perl expects other software to work the same
224       way: if Perl has been led to believe that STDIN should be UTF-8, but
225       then STDIN coming in from another command is not UTF-8, Perl will
226       likely complain about the malformed UTF-8.
227
228       All features that combine Unicode and I/O also require using the new
229       PerlIO feature.  Almost all Perl 5.8 platforms do use PerlIO, though:
230       you can see whether yours is by running "perl -V" and looking for
231       "useperlio=define".
232
233   Unicode and EBCDIC
234       Perl 5.8.0 added support for Unicode on EBCDIC platforms.  This support
235       was allowed to lapse in later releases, but was revived in 5.22.
236       Unicode support is somewhat more complex to implement since additional
237       conversions are needed.  See perlebcdic for more information.
238
239       On EBCDIC platforms, the internal Unicode encoding form is UTF-EBCDIC
240       instead of UTF-8.  The difference is that as UTF-8 is "ASCII-safe" in
241       that ASCII characters encode to UTF-8 as-is, while UTF-EBCDIC is
242       "EBCDIC-safe", in that all the basic characters (which includes all
243       those that have ASCII equivalents (like "A", "0", "%", etc.)  are the
244       same in both EBCDIC and UTF-EBCDIC.  Often, documentation will use the
245       term "UTF-8" to mean UTF-EBCDIC as well.  This is the case in this
246       document.
247
248   Creating Unicode
249       This section applies fully to Perls starting with v5.22.  Various
250       caveats for earlier releases are in the "Earlier releases caveats"
251       subsection below.
252
253       To create Unicode characters in literals, use the "\N{...}" notation in
254       double-quoted strings:
255
256        my $smiley_from_name = "\N{WHITE SMILING FACE}";
257        my $smiley_from_code_point = "\N{U+263a}";
258
259       Similarly, they can be used in regular expression literals
260
261        $smiley =~ /\N{WHITE SMILING FACE}/;
262        $smiley =~ /\N{U+263a}/;
263
264       or, starting in v5.32:
265
266        $smiley =~ /\p{Name=WHITE SMILING FACE}/;
267        $smiley =~ /\p{Name=whitesmilingface}/;
268
269       At run-time you can use:
270
271        use charnames ();
272        my $hebrew_alef_from_name
273                             = charnames::string_vianame("HEBREW LETTER ALEF");
274        my $hebrew_alef_from_code_point = charnames::string_vianame("U+05D0");
275
276       Naturally, "ord()" will do the reverse: it turns a character into a
277       code point.
278
279       There are other runtime options as well.  You can use "pack()":
280
281        my $hebrew_alef_from_code_point = pack("U", 0x05d0);
282
283       Or you can use "chr()", though it is less convenient in the general
284       case:
285
286        $hebrew_alef_from_code_point = chr(utf8::unicode_to_native(0x05d0));
287        utf8::upgrade($hebrew_alef_from_code_point);
288
289       The "utf8::unicode_to_native()" and "utf8::upgrade()" aren't needed if
290       the argument is above 0xFF, so the above could have been written as
291
292        $hebrew_alef_from_code_point = chr(0x05d0);
293
294       since 0x5d0 is above 255.
295
296       "\x{}" and "\o{}" can also be used to specify code points at compile
297       time in double-quotish strings, but, for backward compatibility with
298       older Perls, the same rules apply as with "chr()" for code points less
299       than 256.
300
301       "utf8::unicode_to_native()" is used so that the Perl code is portable
302       to EBCDIC platforms.  You can omit it if you're really sure no one will
303       ever want to use your code on a non-ASCII platform.  Starting in Perl
304       v5.22, calls to it on ASCII platforms are optimized out, so there's no
305       performance penalty at all in adding it.  Or you can simply use the
306       other constructs that don't require it.
307
308       See "Further Resources" for how to find all these names and numeric
309       codes.
310
311       Earlier releases caveats
312
313       On EBCDIC platforms, prior to v5.22, using "\N{U+...}" doesn't work
314       properly.
315
316       Prior to v5.16, using "\N{...}" with a character name (as opposed to a
317       "U+..." code point) required a "use charnames :full".
318
319       Prior to v5.14, there were some bugs in "\N{...}" with a character name
320       (as opposed to a "U+..." code point).
321
322       "charnames::string_vianame()" was introduced in v5.14.  Prior to that,
323       "charnames::vianame()" should work, but only if the argument is of the
324       form "U+...".  Your best bet there for runtime Unicode by character
325       name is probably:
326
327        use charnames ();
328        my $hebrew_alef_from_name
329                         = pack("U", charnames::vianame("HEBREW LETTER ALEF"));
330
331   Handling Unicode
332       Handling Unicode is for the most part transparent: just use the strings
333       as usual.  Functions like "index()", "length()", and "substr()" will
334       work on the Unicode characters; regular expressions will work on the
335       Unicode characters (see perlunicode and perlretut).
336
337       Note that Perl considers grapheme clusters to be separate characters,
338       so for example
339
340        print length("\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A}\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT}"),
341              "\n";
342
343       will print 2, not 1.  The only exception is that regular expressions
344       have "\X" for matching an extended grapheme cluster.  (Thus "\X" in a
345       regular expression would match the entire sequence of both the example
346       characters.)
347
348       Life is not quite so transparent, however, when working with legacy
349       encodings, I/O, and certain special cases:
350
351   Legacy Encodings
352       When you combine legacy data and Unicode, the legacy data needs to be
353       upgraded to Unicode.  Normally the legacy data is assumed to be ISO
354       8859-1 (or EBCDIC, if applicable).
355
356       The "Encode" module knows about many encodings and has interfaces for
357       doing conversions between those encodings:
358
359           use Encode 'decode';
360           $data = decode("iso-8859-3", $data); # convert from legacy
361
362   Unicode I/O
363       Normally, writing out Unicode data
364
365           print FH $some_string_with_unicode, "\n";
366
367       produces raw bytes that Perl happens to use to internally encode the
368       Unicode string.  Perl's internal encoding depends on the system as well
369       as what characters happen to be in the string at the time. If any of
370       the characters are at code points 0x100 or above, you will get a
371       warning.  To ensure that the output is explicitly rendered in the
372       encoding you desire--and to avoid the warning--open the stream with the
373       desired encoding. Some examples:
374
375           open FH, ">:utf8", "file";
376
377           open FH, ">:encoding(ucs2)",      "file";
378           open FH, ">:encoding(UTF-8)",     "file";
379           open FH, ">:encoding(shift_jis)", "file";
380
381       and on already open streams, use "binmode()":
382
383           binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
384
385           binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(ucs2)");
386           binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)");
387           binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(shift_jis)");
388
389       The matching of encoding names is loose: case does not matter, and many
390       encodings have several aliases.  Note that the ":utf8" layer must
391       always be specified exactly like that; it is not subject to the loose
392       matching of encoding names. Also note that currently ":utf8" is unsafe
393       for input, because it accepts the data without validating that it is
394       indeed valid UTF-8; you should instead use ":encoding(UTF-8)" (with or
395       without a hyphen).
396
397       See PerlIO for the ":utf8" layer, PerlIO::encoding and Encode::PerlIO
398       for the ":encoding()" layer, and Encode::Supported for many encodings
399       supported by the "Encode" module.
400
401       Reading in a file that you know happens to be encoded in one of the
402       Unicode or legacy encodings does not magically turn the data into
403       Unicode in Perl's eyes.  To do that, specify the appropriate layer when
404       opening files
405
406           open(my $fh,'<:encoding(UTF-8)', 'anything');
407           my $line_of_unicode = <$fh>;
408
409           open(my $fh,'<:encoding(Big5)', 'anything');
410           my $line_of_unicode = <$fh>;
411
412       The I/O layers can also be specified more flexibly with the "open"
413       pragma.  See open, or look at the following example.
414
415           use open ':encoding(UTF-8)'; # input/output default encoding will be
416                                        # UTF-8
417           open X, ">file";
418           print X chr(0x100), "\n";
419           close X;
420           open Y, "<file";
421           printf "%#x\n", ord(<Y>); # this should print 0x100
422           close Y;
423
424       With the "open" pragma you can use the ":locale" layer
425
426           BEGIN { $ENV{LC_ALL} = $ENV{LANG} = 'ru_RU.KOI8-R' }
427           # the :locale will probe the locale environment variables like
428           # LC_ALL
429           use open OUT => ':locale'; # russki parusski
430           open(O, ">koi8");
431           print O chr(0x430); # Unicode CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A = KOI8-R 0xc1
432           close O;
433           open(I, "<koi8");
434           printf "%#x\n", ord(<I>), "\n"; # this should print 0xc1
435           close I;
436
437       These methods install a transparent filter on the I/O stream that
438       converts data from the specified encoding when it is read in from the
439       stream.  The result is always Unicode.
440
441       The open pragma affects all the "open()" calls after the pragma by
442       setting default layers.  If you want to affect only certain streams,
443       use explicit layers directly in the "open()" call.
444
445       You can switch encodings on an already opened stream by using
446       "binmode()"; see "binmode" in perlfunc.
447
448       The ":locale" does not currently work with "open()" and "binmode()",
449       only with the "open" pragma.  The ":utf8" and ":encoding(...)" methods
450       do work with all of "open()", "binmode()", and the "open" pragma.
451
452       Similarly, you may use these I/O layers on output streams to
453       automatically convert Unicode to the specified encoding when it is
454       written to the stream. For example, the following snippet copies the
455       contents of the file "text.jis" (encoded as ISO-2022-JP, aka JIS) to
456       the file "text.utf8", encoded as UTF-8:
457
458           open(my $nihongo, '<:encoding(iso-2022-jp)', 'text.jis');
459           open(my $unicode, '>:utf8',                  'text.utf8');
460           while (<$nihongo>) { print $unicode $_ }
461
462       The naming of encodings, both by the "open()" and by the "open" pragma
463       allows for flexible names: "koi8-r" and "KOI8R" will both be
464       understood.
465
466       Common encodings recognized by ISO, MIME, IANA, and various other
467       standardisation organisations are recognised; for a more detailed list
468       see Encode::Supported.
469
470       "read()" reads characters and returns the number of characters.
471       "seek()" and "tell()" operate on byte counts, as does "sysseek()".
472
473       "sysread()" and "syswrite()" should not be used on file handles with
474       character encoding layers, they behave badly, and that behaviour has
475       been deprecated since perl 5.24.
476
477       Notice that because of the default behaviour of not doing any
478       conversion upon input if there is no default layer, it is easy to
479       mistakenly write code that keeps on expanding a file by repeatedly
480       encoding the data:
481
482           # BAD CODE WARNING
483           open F, "file";
484           local $/; ## read in the whole file of 8-bit characters
485           $t = <F>;
486           close F;
487           open F, ">:encoding(UTF-8)", "file";
488           print F $t; ## convert to UTF-8 on output
489           close F;
490
491       If you run this code twice, the contents of the file will be twice
492       UTF-8 encoded.  A "use open ':encoding(UTF-8)'" would have avoided the
493       bug, or explicitly opening also the file for input as UTF-8.
494
495       NOTE: the ":utf8" and ":encoding" features work only if your Perl has
496       been built with PerlIO, which is the default on most systems.
497
498   Displaying Unicode As Text
499       Sometimes you might want to display Perl scalars containing Unicode as
500       simple ASCII (or EBCDIC) text.  The following subroutine converts its
501       argument so that Unicode characters with code points greater than 255
502       are displayed as "\x{...}", control characters (like "\n") are
503       displayed as "\x..", and the rest of the characters as themselves:
504
505        sub nice_string {
506               join("",
507               map { $_ > 255                    # if wide character...
508                     ? sprintf("\\x{%04X}", $_)  # \x{...}
509                     : chr($_) =~ /[[:cntrl:]]/  # else if control character...
510                       ? sprintf("\\x%02X", $_)  # \x..
511                       : quotemeta(chr($_))      # else quoted or as themselves
512               } unpack("W*", $_[0]));           # unpack Unicode characters
513          }
514
515       For example,
516
517          nice_string("foo\x{100}bar\n")
518
519       returns the string
520
521          'foo\x{0100}bar\x0A'
522
523       which is ready to be printed.
524
525       ("\\x{}" is used here instead of "\\N{}", since it's most likely that
526       you want to see what the native values are.)
527
528   Special Cases
529       •   Starting in Perl 5.28, it is illegal for bit operators, like "~",
530           to operate on strings containing code points above 255.
531
532       •   The vec() function may produce surprising results if used on
533           strings containing characters with ordinal values above 255. In
534           such a case, the results are consistent with the internal encoding
535           of the characters, but not with much else. So don't do that, and
536           starting in Perl 5.28, a deprecation message is issued if you do
537           so, becoming illegal in Perl 5.32.
538
539       •   Peeking At Perl's Internal Encoding
540
541           Normal users of Perl should never care how Perl encodes any
542           particular Unicode string (because the normal ways to get at the
543           contents of a string with Unicode--via input and output--should
544           always be via explicitly-defined I/O layers). But if you must,
545           there are two ways of looking behind the scenes.
546
547           One way of peeking inside the internal encoding of Unicode
548           characters is to use "unpack("C*", ..." to get the bytes of
549           whatever the string encoding happens to be, or "unpack("U0..",
550           ...)" to get the bytes of the UTF-8 encoding:
551
552               # this prints  c4 80  for the UTF-8 bytes 0xc4 0x80
553               print join(" ", unpack("U0(H2)*", pack("U", 0x100))), "\n";
554
555           Yet another way would be to use the Devel::Peek module:
556
557               perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump(chr(0x100))'
558
559           That shows the "UTF8" flag in FLAGS and both the UTF-8 bytes and
560           Unicode characters in "PV".  See also later in this document the
561           discussion about the "utf8::is_utf8()" function.
562
563   Advanced Topics
564       •   String Equivalence
565
566           The question of string equivalence turns somewhat complicated in
567           Unicode: what do you mean by "equal"?
568
569           (Is "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE" equal to "LATIN CAPITAL
570           LETTER A"?)
571
572           The short answer is that by default Perl compares equivalence
573           ("eq", "ne") based only on code points of the characters.  In the
574           above case, the answer is no (because 0x00C1 != 0x0041).  But
575           sometimes, any CAPITAL LETTER A's should be considered equal, or
576           even A's of any case.
577
578           The long answer is that you need to consider character
579           normalization and casing issues: see Unicode::Normalize, Unicode
580           Technical Report #15, Unicode Normalization Forms
581           <https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15> and sections on case mapping
582           in the Unicode Standard <https://www.unicode.org>.
583
584           As of Perl 5.8.0, the "Full" case-folding of Case
585           Mappings/SpecialCasing is implemented, but bugs remain in "qr//i"
586           with them, mostly fixed by 5.14, and essentially entirely by 5.18.
587
588       •   String Collation
589
590           People like to see their strings nicely sorted--or as Unicode
591           parlance goes, collated.  But again, what do you mean by collate?
592
593           (Does "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE" come before or after
594           "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE"?)
595
596           The short answer is that by default, Perl compares strings ("lt",
597           "le", "cmp", "ge", "gt") based only on the code points of the
598           characters.  In the above case, the answer is "after", since 0x00C1
599           > 0x00C0.
600
601           The long answer is that "it depends", and a good answer cannot be
602           given without knowing (at the very least) the language context.
603           See Unicode::Collate, and Unicode Collation Algorithm
604           <https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/>
605
606   Miscellaneous
607       •   Character Ranges and Classes
608
609           Character ranges in regular expression bracketed character classes
610           ( e.g., "/[a-z]/") and in the "tr///" (also known as "y///")
611           operator are not magically Unicode-aware.  What this means is that
612           "[A-Za-z]" will not magically start to mean "all alphabetic
613           letters" (not that it does mean that even for 8-bit characters; for
614           those, if you are using locales (perllocale), use "/[[:alpha:]]/";
615           and if not, use the 8-bit-aware property "\p{alpha}").
616
617           All the properties that begin with "\p" (and its inverse "\P") are
618           actually character classes that are Unicode-aware.  There are
619           dozens of them, see perluniprops.
620
621           Starting in v5.22, you can use Unicode code points as the end
622           points of regular expression pattern character ranges, and the
623           range will include all Unicode code points that lie between those
624           end points, inclusive.
625
626            qr/ [ \N{U+03} - \N{U+20} ] /xx
627
628           includes the code points "\N{U+03}", "\N{U+04}", ..., "\N{U+20}".
629
630           This also works for ranges in "tr///" starting in Perl v5.24.
631
632       •   String-To-Number Conversions
633
634           Unicode does define several other decimal--and numeric--characters
635           besides the familiar 0 to 9, such as the Arabic and Indic digits.
636           Perl does not support string-to-number conversion for digits other
637           than ASCII 0 to 9 (and ASCII "a" to "f" for hexadecimal).  To get
638           safe conversions from any Unicode string, use "num()" in
639           Unicode::UCD.
640
641   Questions With Answers
642       •   Will My Old Scripts Break?
643
644           Very probably not.  Unless you are generating Unicode characters
645           somehow, old behaviour should be preserved.  About the only
646           behaviour that has changed and which could start generating Unicode
647           is the old behaviour of "chr()" where supplying an argument more
648           than 255 produced a character modulo 255.  "chr(300)", for example,
649           was equal to "chr(45)" or "-" (in ASCII), now it is LATIN CAPITAL
650           LETTER I WITH BREVE.
651
652       •   How Do I Make My Scripts Work With Unicode?
653
654           Very little work should be needed since nothing changes until you
655           generate Unicode data.  The most important thing is getting input
656           as Unicode; for that, see the earlier I/O discussion.  To get full
657           seamless Unicode support, add "use feature 'unicode_strings'" (or
658           "use v5.12" or higher) to your script.
659
660       •   How Do I Know Whether My String Is In Unicode?
661
662           You shouldn't have to care.  But you may if your Perl is before
663           5.14.0 or you haven't specified "use feature 'unicode_strings'" or
664           "use 5.012" (or higher) because otherwise the rules for the code
665           points in the range 128 to 255 are different depending on whether
666           the string they are contained within is in Unicode or not.  (See
667           "When Unicode Does Not Happen" in perlunicode.)
668
669           To determine if a string is in Unicode, use:
670
671               print utf8::is_utf8($string) ? 1 : 0, "\n";
672
673           But note that this doesn't mean that any of the characters in the
674           string are necessary UTF-8 encoded, or that any of the characters
675           have code points greater than 0xFF (255) or even 0x80 (128), or
676           that the string has any characters at all.  All the "is_utf8()"
677           does is to return the value of the internal "utf8ness" flag
678           attached to the $string.  If the flag is off, the bytes in the
679           scalar are interpreted as a single byte encoding.  If the flag is
680           on, the bytes in the scalar are interpreted as the (variable-
681           length, potentially multi-byte) UTF-8 encoded code points of the
682           characters.  Bytes added to a UTF-8 encoded string are
683           automatically upgraded to UTF-8.  If mixed non-UTF-8 and UTF-8
684           scalars are merged (double-quoted interpolation, explicit
685           concatenation, or printf/sprintf parameter substitution), the
686           result will be UTF-8 encoded as if copies of the byte strings were
687           upgraded to UTF-8: for example,
688
689               $a = "ab\x80c";
690               $b = "\x{100}";
691               print "$a = $b\n";
692
693           the output string will be UTF-8-encoded "ab\x80c = \x{100}\n", but
694           $a will stay byte-encoded.
695
696           Sometimes you might really need to know the byte length of a string
697           instead of the character length. For that use the "bytes" pragma
698           and the "length()" function:
699
700               my $unicode = chr(0x100);
701               print length($unicode), "\n"; # will print 1
702               use bytes;
703               print length($unicode), "\n"; # will print 2
704                                             # (the 0xC4 0x80 of the UTF-8)
705               no bytes;
706
707       •   How Do I Find Out What Encoding a File Has?
708
709           You might try Encode::Guess, but it has a number of limitations.
710
711       •   How Do I Detect Data That's Not Valid In a Particular Encoding?
712
713           Use the "Encode" package to try converting it.  For example,
714
715               use Encode 'decode';
716
717               if (eval { decode('UTF-8', $string, Encode::FB_CROAK); 1 }) {
718                   # $string is valid UTF-8
719               } else {
720                   # $string is not valid UTF-8
721               }
722
723           Or use "unpack" to try decoding it:
724
725               use warnings;
726               @chars = unpack("C0U*", $string_of_bytes_that_I_think_is_utf8);
727
728           If invalid, a "Malformed UTF-8 character" warning is produced. The
729           "C0" means "process the string character per character".  Without
730           that, the "unpack("U*", ...)" would work in "U0" mode (the default
731           if the format string starts with "U") and it would return the bytes
732           making up the UTF-8 encoding of the target string, something that
733           will always work.
734
735       •   How Do I Convert Binary Data Into a Particular Encoding, Or Vice
736           Versa?
737
738           This probably isn't as useful as you might think.  Normally, you
739           shouldn't need to.
740
741           In one sense, what you are asking doesn't make much sense:
742           encodings are for characters, and binary data are not "characters",
743           so converting "data" into some encoding isn't meaningful unless you
744           know in what character set and encoding the binary data is in, in
745           which case it's not just binary data, now is it?
746
747           If you have a raw sequence of bytes that you know should be
748           interpreted via a particular encoding, you can use "Encode":
749
750               use Encode 'from_to';
751               from_to($data, "iso-8859-1", "UTF-8"); # from latin-1 to UTF-8
752
753           The call to "from_to()" changes the bytes in $data, but nothing
754           material about the nature of the string has changed as far as Perl
755           is concerned.  Both before and after the call, the string $data
756           contains just a bunch of 8-bit bytes. As far as Perl is concerned,
757           the encoding of the string remains as "system-native 8-bit bytes".
758
759           You might relate this to a fictional 'Translate' module:
760
761              use Translate;
762              my $phrase = "Yes";
763              Translate::from_to($phrase, 'english', 'deutsch');
764              ## phrase now contains "Ja"
765
766           The contents of the string changes, but not the nature of the
767           string.  Perl doesn't know any more after the call than before that
768           the contents of the string indicates the affirmative.
769
770           Back to converting data.  If you have (or want) data in your
771           system's native 8-bit encoding (e.g. Latin-1, EBCDIC, etc.), you
772           can use pack/unpack to convert to/from Unicode.
773
774               $native_string  = pack("W*", unpack("U*", $Unicode_string));
775               $Unicode_string = pack("U*", unpack("W*", $native_string));
776
777           If you have a sequence of bytes you know is valid UTF-8, but Perl
778           doesn't know it yet, you can make Perl a believer, too:
779
780               $Unicode = $bytes;
781               utf8::decode($Unicode);
782
783           or:
784
785               $Unicode = pack("U0a*", $bytes);
786
787           You can find the bytes that make up a UTF-8 sequence with
788
789               @bytes = unpack("C*", $Unicode_string)
790
791           and you can create well-formed Unicode with
792
793               $Unicode_string = pack("U*", 0xff, ...)
794
795       •   How Do I Display Unicode?  How Do I Input Unicode?
796
797           See <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/> and
798           <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html>
799
800       •   How Does Unicode Work With Traditional Locales?
801
802           If your locale is a UTF-8 locale, starting in Perl v5.26, Perl
803           works well for all categories; before this, starting with Perl
804           v5.20, it works for all categories but "LC_COLLATE", which deals
805           with sorting and the "cmp" operator.  But note that the standard
806           "Unicode::Collate" and "Unicode::Collate::Locale" modules offer
807           much more powerful solutions to collation issues, and work on
808           earlier releases.
809
810           For other locales, starting in Perl 5.16, you can specify
811
812               use locale ':not_characters';
813
814           to get Perl to work well with them.  The catch is that you have to
815           translate from the locale character set to/from Unicode yourself.
816           See "Unicode I/O" above for how to
817
818               use open ':locale';
819
820           to accomplish this, but full details are in "Unicode and UTF-8" in
821           perllocale, including gotchas that happen if you don't specify
822           ":not_characters".
823
824   Hexadecimal Notation
825       The Unicode standard prefers using hexadecimal notation because that
826       more clearly shows the division of Unicode into blocks of 256
827       characters.  Hexadecimal is also simply shorter than decimal.  You can
828       use decimal notation, too, but learning to use hexadecimal just makes
829       life easier with the Unicode standard.  The "U+HHHH" notation uses
830       hexadecimal, for example.
831
832       The "0x" prefix means a hexadecimal number, the digits are 0-9 and a-f
833       (or A-F, case doesn't matter).  Each hexadecimal digit represents four
834       bits, or half a byte.  "print 0x..., "\n"" will show a hexadecimal
835       number in decimal, and "printf "%x\n", $decimal" will show a decimal
836       number in hexadecimal.  If you have just the "hex digits" of a
837       hexadecimal number, you can use the "hex()" function.
838
839           print 0x0009, "\n";    # 9
840           print 0x000a, "\n";    # 10
841           print 0x000f, "\n";    # 15
842           print 0x0010, "\n";    # 16
843           print 0x0011, "\n";    # 17
844           print 0x0100, "\n";    # 256
845
846           print 0x0041, "\n";    # 65
847
848           printf "%x\n",  65;    # 41
849           printf "%#x\n", 65;    # 0x41
850
851           print hex("41"), "\n"; # 65
852
853   Further Resources
854       •   Unicode Consortium
855
856           <https://www.unicode.org/>
857
858       •   Unicode FAQ
859
860           <https://www.unicode.org/faq/>
861
862       •   Unicode Glossary
863
864           <https://www.unicode.org/glossary/>
865
866       •   Unicode Recommended Reading List
867
868           The Unicode Consortium has a list of articles and books, some of
869           which give a much more in depth treatment of Unicode:
870           <http://unicode.org/resources/readinglist.html>
871
872       •   Unicode Useful Resources
873
874           <https://www.unicode.org/unicode/onlinedat/resources.html>
875
876       •   Unicode and Multilingual Support in HTML, Fonts, Web Browsers and
877           Other Applications
878
879           <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/>
880
881       •   UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux
882
883           <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html>
884
885       •   Legacy Character Sets
886
887           <http://www.czyborra.com/> <http://www.eki.ee/letter/>
888
889       •   You can explore various information from the Unicode data files
890           using the "Unicode::UCD" module.
891

UNICODE IN OLDER PERLS

893       If you cannot upgrade your Perl to 5.8.0 or later, you can still do
894       some Unicode processing by using the modules "Unicode::String",
895       "Unicode::Map8", and "Unicode::Map", available from CPAN.  If you have
896       the GNU recode installed, you can also use the Perl front-end
897       "Convert::Recode" for character conversions.
898
899       The following are fast conversions from ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) bytes to
900       UTF-8 bytes and back, the code works even with older Perl 5 versions.
901
902           # ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8
903           s/([\x80-\xFF])/chr(0xC0|ord($1)>>6).chr(0x80|ord($1)&0x3F)/eg;
904
905           # UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1
906           s/([\xC2\xC3])([\x80-\xBF])/chr(ord($1)<<6&0xC0|ord($2)&0x3F)/eg;
907

SEE ALSO

909       perlunitut, perlunicode, Encode, open, utf8, bytes, perlretut, perlrun,
910       Unicode::Collate, Unicode::Normalize, Unicode::UCD
911

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

913       Thanks to the kind readers of the perl5-porters@perl.org,
914       perl-unicode@perl.org, linux-utf8@nl.linux.org, and unicore@unicode.org
915       mailing lists for their valuable feedback.
916

AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AND LICENSE

918       Copyright 2001-2011 Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>.  Now maintained by
919       Perl 5 Porters.
920
921       This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.
922
923
924
925perl v5.36.3                      2023-11-30                   PERLUNIINTRO(1)
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