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perlunicode

Perl 5 version 10.1 documentation
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perlunicode

NAME

perlunicode - Unicode support in Perl

DESCRIPTION

Important Caveats

Unicode support is an extensive requirement. While Perl does not implement the Unicode standard or the accompanying technical reports from cover to cover, Perl does support many Unicode features.

People who want to learn to use Unicode in Perl, should probably read the Perl Unicode tutorial, perlunitut, before reading this reference document.

  • Input and Output Layers

    Perl knows when a filehandle uses Perl's internal Unicode encodings (UTF-8, or UTF-EBCDIC if in EBCDIC) if the filehandle is opened with the ":utf8" layer. Other encodings can be converted to Perl's encoding on input or from Perl's encoding on output by use of the ":encoding(...)" layer. See open.

    To indicate that Perl source itself is in UTF-8, use use utf8; .

  • Regular Expressions

    The regular expression compiler produces polymorphic opcodes. That is, the pattern adapts to the data and automatically switches to the Unicode character scheme when presented with data that is internally encoded in UTF-8 -- or instead uses a traditional byte scheme when presented with byte data.

  • use utf8 still needed to enable UTF-8/UTF-EBCDIC in scripts

    As a compatibility measure, the use utf8 pragma must be explicitly included to enable recognition of UTF-8 in the Perl scripts themselves (in string or regular expression literals, or in identifier names) on ASCII-based machines or to recognize UTF-EBCDIC on EBCDIC-based machines. These are the only times when an explicit use utf8 is needed. See utf8.

  • BOM-marked scripts and UTF-16 scripts autodetected

    If a Perl script begins marked with the Unicode BOM (UTF-16LE, UTF16-BE, or UTF-8), or if the script looks like non-BOM-marked UTF-16 of either endianness, Perl will correctly read in the script as Unicode. (BOMless UTF-8 cannot be effectively recognized or differentiated from ISO 8859-1 or other eight-bit encodings.)

  • use encoding needed to upgrade non-Latin-1 byte strings

    By default, there is a fundamental asymmetry in Perl's Unicode model: implicit upgrading from byte strings to Unicode strings assumes that they were encoded in ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), but Unicode strings are downgraded with UTF-8 encoding. This happens because the first 256 codepoints in Unicode happens to agree with Latin-1.

    See Byte and Character Semantics for more details.

Byte and Character Semantics

Beginning with version 5.6, Perl uses logically-wide characters to represent strings internally.

In future, Perl-level operations will be expected to work with characters rather than bytes.

However, as an interim compatibility measure, Perl aims to provide a safe migration path from byte semantics to character semantics for programs. For operations where Perl can unambiguously decide that the input data are characters, Perl switches to character semantics. For operations where this determination cannot be made without additional information from the user, Perl decides in favor of compatibility and chooses to use byte semantics.

Under byte semantics, when use locale is in effect, Perl uses the semantics associated with the current locale. Absent a use locale , Perl currently uses US-ASCII (or Basic Latin in Unicode terminology) byte semantics, meaning that characters whose ordinal numbers are in the range 128 - 255 are undefined except for their ordinal numbers. This means that none have case (upper and lower), nor are any a member of character classes, like [:alpha:] or \w . (But all do belong to the \W class or the Perl regular expression extension [:^alpha:].)

This behavior preserves compatibility with earlier versions of Perl, which allowed byte semantics in Perl operations only if none of the program's inputs were marked as being as source of Unicode character data. Such data may come from filehandles, from calls to external programs, from information provided by the system (such as %ENV), or from literals and constants in the source text.

The bytes pragma will always, regardless of platform, force byte semantics in a particular lexical scope. See bytes.

The utf8 pragma is primarily a compatibility device that enables recognition of UTF-(8|EBCDIC) in literals encountered by the parser. Note that this pragma is only required while Perl defaults to byte semantics; when character semantics become the default, this pragma may become a no-op. See utf8.

Unless explicitly stated, Perl operators use character semantics for Unicode data and byte semantics for non-Unicode data. The decision to use character semantics is made transparently. If input data comes from a Unicode source--for example, if a character encoding layer is added to a filehandle or a literal Unicode string constant appears in a program--character semantics apply. Otherwise, byte semantics are in effect. The bytes pragma should be used to force byte semantics on Unicode data.

If strings operating under byte semantics and strings with Unicode character data are concatenated, the new string will have character semantics. This can cause surprises: See BUGS, below

Under character semantics, many operations that formerly operated on bytes now operate on characters. A character in Perl is logically just a number ranging from 0 to 2**31 or so. Larger characters may encode into longer sequences of bytes internally, but this internal detail is mostly hidden for Perl code. See perluniintro for more.

Effects of Character Semantics

Character semantics have the following effects:

  • Strings--including hash keys--and regular expression patterns may contain characters that have an ordinal value larger than 255.

    If you use a Unicode editor to edit your program, Unicode characters may occur directly within the literal strings in UTF-8 encoding, or UTF-16. (The former requires a BOM or use utf8 , the latter requires a BOM.)

    Unicode characters can also be added to a string by using the \x{...} notation. The Unicode code for the desired character, in hexadecimal, should be placed in the braces. For instance, a smiley face is \x{263A}. This encoding scheme works for all characters, but for characters under 0x100, note that Perl may use an 8 bit encoding internally, for optimization and/or backward compatibility.

    Additionally, if you

    1.    use charnames ':full';

    you can use the \N{...} notation and put the official Unicode character name within the braces, such as \N{WHITE SMILING FACE} .

  • If an appropriate encoding is specified, identifiers within the Perl script may contain Unicode alphanumeric characters, including ideographs. Perl does not currently attempt to canonicalize variable names.

  • Regular expressions match characters instead of bytes. "." matches a character instead of a byte.

  • Character classes in regular expressions match characters instead of bytes and match against the character properties specified in the Unicode properties database. \w can be used to match a Japanese ideograph, for instance.

  • Named Unicode properties, scripts, and block ranges may be used like character classes via the \p{} "matches property" construct and the \P{} negation, "doesn't match property".

    See Unicode Character Properties for more details.

    You can define your own character properties and use them in the regular expression with the \p{} or \P{} construct.

    See User-Defined Character Properties for more details.

  • The special pattern \X matches any extended Unicode sequence--"a combining character sequence" in Standardese--where the first character is a base character and subsequent characters are mark characters that apply to the base character. \X is equivalent to (?>\PM\pM*).

  • The tr/// operator translates characters instead of bytes. Note that the tr///CU functionality has been removed. For similar functionality see pack('U0', ...) and pack('C0', ...).

  • Case translation operators use the Unicode case translation tables when character input is provided. Note that uc(), or \U in interpolated strings, translates to uppercase, while ucfirst, or \u in interpolated strings, translates to titlecase in languages that make the distinction.

  • Most operators that deal with positions or lengths in a string will automatically switch to using character positions, including chop(), chomp(), substr(), pos(), index(), rindex(), sprintf(), write(), and length(). An operator that specifically does not switch is vec(). Operators that really don't care include operators that treat strings as a bucket of bits such as sort(), and operators dealing with filenames.

  • The pack()/unpack() letter C does not change, since it is often used for byte-oriented formats. Again, think char in the C language.

    There is a new U specifier that converts between Unicode characters and code points. There is also a W specifier that is the equivalent of chr/ord and properly handles character values even if they are above 255.

  • The chr() and ord() functions work on characters, similar to pack("W") and unpack("W"), not pack("C") and unpack("C"). pack("C") and unpack("C") are methods for emulating byte-oriented chr() and ord() on Unicode strings. While these methods reveal the internal encoding of Unicode strings, that is not something one normally needs to care about at all.

  • The bit string operators, & | ^ ~ , can operate on character data. However, for backward compatibility, such as when using bit string operations when characters are all less than 256 in ordinal value, one should not use ~ (the bit complement) with characters of both values less than 256 and values greater than 256. Most importantly, DeMorgan's laws (~($x|$y) eq ~$x&~$y and ~($x&$y) eq ~$x|~$y ) will not hold. The reason for this mathematical faux pas is that the complement cannot return both the 8-bit (byte-wide) bit complement and the full character-wide bit complement.

  • lc(), uc(), lcfirst(), and ucfirst() work for the following cases:

    • the case mapping is from a single Unicode character to another single Unicode character, or

    • the case mapping is from a single Unicode character to more than one Unicode character.

    Things to do with locales (Lithuanian, Turkish, Azeri) do not work since Perl does not understand the concept of Unicode locales.

    See the Unicode Technical Report #21, Case Mappings, for more details.

    But you can also define your own mappings to be used in the lc(), lcfirst(), uc(), and ucfirst() (or their string-inlined versions).

    See User-Defined Case Mappings for more details.

  • And finally, scalar reverse() reverses by character rather than by byte.

Unicode Character Properties

Named Unicode properties, scripts, and block ranges may be used like character classes via the \p{} "matches property" construct and the \P{} negation, "doesn't match property".

For instance, \p{Lu} matches any character with the Unicode "Lu" (Letter, uppercase) property, while \p{M} matches any character with an "M" (mark--accents and such) property. Brackets are not required for single letter properties, so \p{M} is equivalent to \pM . Many predefined properties are available, such as \p{Mirrored} and \p{Tibetan} .

The official Unicode script and block names have spaces and dashes as separators, but for convenience you can use dashes, spaces, or underbars, and case is unimportant. It is recommended, however, that for consistency you use the following naming: the official Unicode script, property, or block name (see below for the additional rules that apply to block names) with whitespace and dashes removed, and the words "uppercase-first-lowercase-rest". Latin-1 Supplement thus becomes Latin1Supplement .

You can also use negation in both \p{} and \P{} by introducing a caret (^) between the first brace and the property name: \p{^Tamil} is equal to \P{Tamil} .

NOTE: the properties, scripts, and blocks listed here are as of Unicode 5.0.0 in July 2006.

  • General Category

    Here are the basic Unicode General Category properties, followed by their long form. You can use either; \p{Lu} and \p{UppercaseLetter} , for instance, are identical.

    1.     Short       Long
    3.     L           Letter
    4.     LC          CasedLetter
    5.     Lu          UppercaseLetter
    6.     Ll          LowercaseLetter
    7.     Lt          TitlecaseLetter
    8.     Lm          ModifierLetter
    9.     Lo          OtherLetter
    11.     M           Mark
    12.     Mn          NonspacingMark
    13.     Mc          SpacingMark
    14.     Me          EnclosingMark
    16.     N           Number
    17.     Nd          DecimalNumber
    18.     Nl          LetterNumber
    19.     No          OtherNumber
    21.     P           Punctuation
    22.     Pc          ConnectorPunctuation
    23.     Pd          DashPunctuation
    24.     Ps          OpenPunctuation
    25.     Pe          ClosePunctuation
    26.     Pi          InitialPunctuation
    27.                 (may behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage)
    28.     Pf          FinalPunctuation
    29.                 (may behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage)
    30.     Po          OtherPunctuation
    32.     S           Symbol
    33.     Sm          MathSymbol
    34.     Sc          CurrencySymbol
    35.     Sk          ModifierSymbol
    36.     So          OtherSymbol
    38.     Z           Separator
    39.     Zs          SpaceSeparator
    40.     Zl          LineSeparator
    41.     Zp          ParagraphSeparator
    43.     C           Other
    44.     Cc          Control
    45.     Cf          Format
    46.     Cs          Surrogate   (not usable)
    47.     Co          PrivateUse
    48.     Cn          Unassigned

    Single-letter properties match all characters in any of the two-letter sub-properties starting with the same letter. LC and L& are special cases, which are aliases for the set of Ll , Lu , and Lt .

    Because Perl hides the need for the user to understand the internal representation of Unicode characters, there is no need to implement the somewhat messy concept of surrogates. Cs is therefore not supported.

  • Bidirectional Character Types

    Because scripts differ in their directionality--Hebrew is written right to left, for example--Unicode supplies these properties in the BidiClass class:

    1.     Property    Meaning
    3.     L           Left-to-Right
    4.     LRE         Left-to-Right Embedding
    5.     LRO         Left-to-Right Override
    6.     R           Right-to-Left
    7.     AL          Right-to-Left Arabic
    8.     RLE         Right-to-Left Embedding
    9.     RLO         Right-to-Left Override
    10.     PDF         Pop Directional Format
    11.     EN          European Number
    12.     ES          European Number Separator
    13.     ET          European Number Terminator
    14.     AN          Arabic Number
    15.     CS          Common Number Separator
    16.     NSM         Non-Spacing Mark
    17.     BN          Boundary Neutral
    18.     B           Paragraph Separator
    19.     S           Segment Separator
    20.     WS          Whitespace
    21.     ON          Other Neutrals

    For example, \p{BidiClass:R} matches characters that are normally written right to left.

  • Scripts

    The script names which can be used by \p{...} and \P{...} , such as in \p{Latin} or \p{Cyrillic} , are as follows:

    1.     Arabic
    2.     Armenian
    3.     Balinese
    4.     Bengali
    5.     Bopomofo
    6.     Braille
    7.     Buginese
    8.     Buhid
    9.     CanadianAboriginal
    10.     Cherokee
    11.     Coptic
    12.     Cuneiform
    13.     Cypriot
    14.     Cyrillic
    15.     Deseret
    16.     Devanagari
    17.     Ethiopic
    18.     Georgian
    19.     Glagolitic
    20.     Gothic
    21.     Greek
    22.     Gujarati
    23.     Gurmukhi
    24.     Han
    25.     Hangul
    26.     Hanunoo
    27.     Hebrew
    28.     Hiragana
    29.     Inherited
    30.     Kannada
    31.     Katakana
    32.     Kharoshthi
    33.     Khmer
    34.     Lao
    35.     Latin
    36.     Limbu
    37.     LinearB
    38.     Malayalam
    39.     Mongolian
    40.     Myanmar
    41.     NewTaiLue
    42.     Nko
    43.     Ogham
    44.     OldItalic
    45.     OldPersian
    46.     Oriya
    47.     Osmanya
    48.     PhagsPa
    49.     Phoenician
    50.     Runic
    51.     Shavian
    52.     Sinhala
    53.     SylotiNagri
    54.     Syriac
    55.     Tagalog
    56.     Tagbanwa
    57.     TaiLe
    58.     Tamil
    59.     Telugu
    60.     Thaana
    61.     Thai
    62.     Tibetan
    63.     Tifinagh
    64.     Ugaritic
    65.     Yi
  • Extended property classes

    Extended property classes can supplement the basic properties, defined by the PropList Unicode database:

    1.     ASCIIHexDigit
    2.     BidiControl
    3.     Dash
    4.     Deprecated
    5.     Diacritic
    6.     Extender
    7.     HexDigit
    8.     Hyphen
    9.     Ideographic
    10.     IDSBinaryOperator
    11.     IDSTrinaryOperator
    12.     JoinControl
    13.     LogicalOrderException
    14.     NoncharacterCodePoint
    15.     OtherAlphabetic
    16.     OtherDefaultIgnorableCodePoint
    17.     OtherGraphemeExtend
    18.     OtherIDStart
    19.     OtherIDContinue
    20.     OtherLowercase
    21.     OtherMath
    22.     OtherUppercase
    23.     PatternSyntax
    24.     PatternWhiteSpace
    25.     QuotationMark
    26.     Radical
    27.     SoftDotted
    28.     STerm
    29.     TerminalPunctuation
    30.     UnifiedIdeograph
    31.     VariationSelector
    32.     WhiteSpace

    and there are further derived properties:

    1.     Alphabetic  =  Lu + Ll + Lt + Lm + Lo + Nl + OtherAlphabetic
    2.     Lowercase   =  Ll + OtherLowercase
    3.     Uppercase   =  Lu + OtherUppercase
    4.     Math        =  Sm + OtherMath
    6.     IDStart     =  Lu + Ll + Lt + Lm + Lo + Nl + OtherIDStart
    7.     IDContinue  =  IDStart + Mn + Mc + Nd + Pc + OtherIDContinue
    9.     DefaultIgnorableCodePoint
    10.                 =  OtherDefaultIgnorableCodePoint
    11.                    + Cf + Cc + Cs + Noncharacters + VariationSelector
    12.                    - WhiteSpace - FFF9..FFFB (Annotation Characters)
    14.     Any         =  Any code points (i.e. U+0000 to U+10FFFF)
    15.     Assigned    =  Any non-Cn code points (i.e. synonym for \P{Cn})
    16.     Unassigned  =  Synonym for \p{Cn}
    17.     ASCII       =  ASCII (i.e. U+0000 to U+007F)
    19.     Common      =  Any character (or unassigned code point)
    20.                    not explicitly assigned to a script
  • Use of "Is" Prefix

    For backward compatibility (with Perl 5.6), all properties mentioned so far may have Is prepended to their name, so \P{IsLu} , for example, is equal to \P{Lu} .

  • Blocks

    In addition to scripts, Unicode also defines blocks of characters. The difference between scripts and blocks is that the concept of scripts is closer to natural languages, while the concept of blocks is more of an artificial grouping based on groups of 256 Unicode characters. For example, the Latin script contains letters from many blocks but does not contain all the characters from those blocks. It does not, for example, contain digits, because digits are shared across many scripts. Digits and similar groups, like punctuation, are in a category called Common .

    For more about scripts, see the UAX#24 "Script Names":

    1.    http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24/

    For more about blocks, see:

    1.    http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Blocks.txt

    Block names are given with the In prefix. For example, the Katakana block is referenced via \p{InKatakana} . The In prefix may be omitted if there is no naming conflict with a script or any other property, but it is recommended that In always be used for block tests to avoid confusion.

    These block names are supported:

    1.     InAegeanNumbers
    2.     InAlphabeticPresentationForms
    3.     InAncientGreekMusicalNotation
    4.     InAncientGreekNumbers
    5.     InArabic
    6.     InArabicPresentationFormsA
    7.     InArabicPresentationFormsB
    8.     InArabicSupplement
    9.     InArmenian
    10.     InArrows
    11.     InBalinese
    12.     InBasicLatin
    13.     InBengali
    14.     InBlockElements
    15.     InBopomofo
    16.     InBopomofoExtended
    17.     InBoxDrawing
    18.     InBraillePatterns
    19.     InBuginese
    20.     InBuhid
    21.     InByzantineMusicalSymbols
    22.     InCJKCompatibility
    23.     InCJKCompatibilityForms
    24.     InCJKCompatibilityIdeographs
    25.     InCJKCompatibilityIdeographsSupplement
    26.     InCJKRadicalsSupplement
    27.     InCJKStrokes
    28.     InCJKSymbolsAndPunctuation
    29.     InCJKUnifiedIdeographs
    30.     InCJKUnifiedIdeographsExtensionA
    31.     InCJKUnifiedIdeographsExtensionB
    32.     InCherokee
    33.     InCombiningDiacriticalMarks
    34.     InCombiningDiacriticalMarksSupplement
    35.     InCombiningDiacriticalMarksforSymbols
    36.     InCombiningHalfMarks
    37.     InControlPictures
    38.     InCoptic
    39.     InCountingRodNumerals
    40.     InCuneiform
    41.     InCuneiformNumbersAndPunctuation
    42.     InCurrencySymbols
    43.     InCypriotSyllabary
    44.     InCyrillic
    45.     InCyrillicSupplement
    46.     InDeseret
    47.     InDevanagari
    48.     InDingbats
    49.     InEnclosedAlphanumerics
    50.     InEnclosedCJKLettersAndMonths
    51.     InEthiopic
    52.     InEthiopicExtended
    53.     InEthiopicSupplement
    54.     InGeneralPunctuation
    55.     InGeometricShapes
    56.     InGeorgian
    57.     InGeorgianSupplement
    58.     InGlagolitic
    59.     InGothic
    60.     InGreekExtended
    61.     InGreekAndCoptic
    62.     InGujarati
    63.     InGurmukhi
    64.     InHalfwidthAndFullwidthForms
    65.     InHangulCompatibilityJamo
    66.     InHangulJamo
    67.     InHangulSyllables
    68.     InHanunoo
    69.     InHebrew
    70.     InHighPrivateUseSurrogates
    71.     InHighSurrogates
    72.     InHiragana
    73.     InIPAExtensions
    74.     InIdeographicDescriptionCharacters
    75.     InKanbun
    76.     InKangxiRadicals
    77.     InKannada
    78.     InKatakana
    79.     InKatakanaPhoneticExtensions
    80.     InKharoshthi
    81.     InKhmer
    82.     InKhmerSymbols
    83.     InLao
    84.     InLatin1Supplement
    85.     InLatinExtendedA
    86.     InLatinExtendedAdditional
    87.     InLatinExtendedB
    88.     InLatinExtendedC
    89.     InLatinExtendedD
    90.     InLetterlikeSymbols
    91.     InLimbu
    92.     InLinearBIdeograms
    93.     InLinearBSyllabary
    94.     InLowSurrogates
    95.     InMalayalam
    96.     InMathematicalAlphanumericSymbols
    97.     InMathematicalOperators
    98.     InMiscellaneousMathematicalSymbolsA
    99.     InMiscellaneousMathematicalSymbolsB
    100.     InMiscellaneousSymbols
    101.     InMiscellaneousSymbolsAndArrows
    102.     InMiscellaneousTechnical
    103.     InModifierToneLetters
    104.     InMongolian
    105.     InMusicalSymbols
    106.     InMyanmar
    107.     InNKo
    108.     InNewTaiLue
    109.     InNumberForms
    110.     InOgham
    111.     InOldItalic
    112.     InOldPersian
    113.     InOpticalCharacterRecognition
    114.     InOriya
    115.     InOsmanya
    116.     InPhagspa
    117.     InPhoenician
    118.     InPhoneticExtensions
    119.     InPhoneticExtensionsSupplement
    120.     InPrivateUseArea
    121.     InRunic
    122.     InShavian
    123.     InSinhala
    124.     InSmallFormVariants
    125.     InSpacingModifierLetters
    126.     InSpecials
    127.     InSuperscriptsAndSubscripts
    128.     InSupplementalArrowsA
    129.     InSupplementalArrowsB
    130.     InSupplementalMathematicalOperators
    131.     InSupplementalPunctuation
    132.     InSupplementaryPrivateUseAreaA
    133.     InSupplementaryPrivateUseAreaB
    134.     InSylotiNagri
    135.     InSyriac
    136.     InTagalog
    137.     InTagbanwa
    138.     InTags
    139.     InTaiLe
    140.     InTaiXuanJingSymbols
    141.     InTamil
    142.     InTelugu
    143.     InThaana
    144.     InThai
    145.     InTibetan
    146.     InTifinagh
    147.     InUgaritic
    148.     InUnifiedCanadianAboriginalSyllabics
    149.     InVariationSelectors
    150.     InVariationSelectorsSupplement
    151.     InVerticalForms
    152.     InYiRadicals
    153.     InYiSyllables
    154.     InYijingHexagramSymbols

User-Defined Character Properties

You can define your own character properties by defining subroutines whose names begin with "In" or "Is". The subroutines can be defined in any package. The user-defined properties can be used in the regular expression \p and \P constructs; if you are using a user-defined property from a package other than the one you are in, you must specify its package in the \p or \P construct.

  1.     # assuming property IsForeign defined in Lang::
  2.     package main;  # property package name required
  3.     if ($txt =~ /\p{Lang::IsForeign}+/) { ... }
  5.     package Lang;  # property package name not required
  6.     if ($txt =~ /\p{IsForeign}+/) { ... }

Note that the effect is compile-time and immutable once defined.

The subroutines must return a specially-formatted string, with one or more newline-separated lines. Each line must be one of the following:

  • A single hexadecimal number denoting a Unicode code point to include.

  • Two hexadecimal numbers separated by horizontal whitespace (space or tabular characters) denoting a range of Unicode code points to include.

  • Something to include, prefixed by "+": a built-in character property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a user-defined character property, to represent all the characters in that property; two hexadecimal code points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

  • Something to exclude, prefixed by "-": an existing character property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a user-defined character property, to represent all the characters in that property; two hexadecimal code points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

  • Something to negate, prefixed "!": an existing character property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a user-defined character property, to represent all the characters in that property; two hexadecimal code points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

  • Something to intersect with, prefixed by "&": an existing character property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a user-defined character property, for all the characters except the characters in the property; two hexadecimal code points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

For example, to define a property that covers both the Japanese syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), you can define

  1.     sub InKana {
  2. 	return <<END;
  3.     3040\t309F
  4.     30A0\t30FF
  5.     END
  6.     }

Imagine that the here-doc end marker is at the beginning of the line. Now you can use \p{InKana} and \P{InKana} .

You could also have used the existing block property names:

  1.     sub InKana {
  2. 	return <<'END';
  3.     +utf8::InHiragana
  4.     +utf8::InKatakana
  5.     END
  6.     }

Suppose you wanted to match only the allocated characters, not the raw block ranges: in other words, you want to remove the non-characters:

  1.     sub InKana {
  2. 	return <<'END';
  3.     +utf8::InHiragana
  4.     +utf8::InKatakana
  5.     -utf8::IsCn
  6.     END
  7.     }

The negation is useful for defining (surprise!) negated classes.

  1.     sub InNotKana {
  2. 	return <<'END';
  3.     !utf8::InHiragana
  4.     -utf8::InKatakana
  5.     +utf8::IsCn
  6.     END
  7.     }

Intersection is useful for getting the common characters matched by two (or more) classes.

  1.     sub InFooAndBar {
  2.         return <<'END';
  3.     +main::Foo
  4.     &main::Bar
  5.     END
  6.     }

It's important to remember not to use "&" for the first set -- that would be intersecting with nothing (resulting in an empty set).

User-Defined Case Mappings

You can also define your own mappings to be used in the lc(), lcfirst(), uc(), and ucfirst() (or their string-inlined versions). The principle is similar to that of user-defined character properties: to define subroutines in the main package with names like ToLower (for lc() and lcfirst()), ToTitle (for the first character in ucfirst()), and ToUpper (for uc(), and the rest of the characters in ucfirst()).

The string returned by the subroutines needs now to be three hexadecimal numbers separated by tabulators: start of the source range, end of the source range, and start of the destination range. For example:

  1.     sub ToUpper {
  2. 	return <<END;
  3.     0061\t0063\t0041
  4.     END
  5.     }

defines an uc() mapping that causes only the characters "a", "b", and "c" to be mapped to "A", "B", "C", all other characters will remain unchanged.

If there is no source range to speak of, that is, the mapping is from a single character to another single character, leave the end of the source range empty, but the two tabulator characters are still needed. For example:

  1.     sub ToLower {
  2. 	return <<END;
  3.     0041\t\t0061
  4.     END
  5.     }

defines a lc() mapping that causes only "A" to be mapped to "a", all other characters will remain unchanged.

(For serious hackers only) If you want to introspect the default mappings, you can find the data in the directory $Config{privlib} /unicore/To/. The mapping data is returned as the here-document, and the utf8::ToSpecFoo are special exception mappings derived from <$Config{privlib}>/unicore/SpecialCasing.txt. The Digit and Fold mappings that one can see in the directory are not directly user-accessible, one can use either the Unicode::UCD module, or just match case-insensitively (that's when the Fold mapping is used).

A final note on the user-defined case mappings: they will be used only if the scalar has been marked as having Unicode characters. Old byte-style strings will not be affected.

Character Encodings for Input and Output

See Encode.

Unicode Regular Expression Support Level

The following list of Unicode support for regular expressions describes all the features currently supported. The references to "Level N" and the section numbers refer to the Unicode Technical Standard #18, "Unicode Regular Expressions", version 11, in May 2005.

  • Level 1 - Basic Unicode Support

    1.         RL1.1   Hex Notation                        - done          [1]
    2.         RL1.2   Properties                          - done          [2][3]
    3.         RL1.2a  Compatibility Properties            - done          [4]
    4.         RL1.3   Subtraction and Intersection        - MISSING       [5]
    5.         RL1.4   Simple Word Boundaries              - done          [6]
    6.         RL1.5   Simple Loose Matches                - done          [7]
    7.         RL1.6   Line Boundaries                     - MISSING       [8]
    8.         RL1.7   Supplementary Code Points           - done          [9]
    10.         [1]  \x{...}
    11.         [2]  \p{...} \P{...}
    12.         [3]  supports not only minimal list (general category, scripts,
    13.              Alphabetic, Lowercase, Uppercase, WhiteSpace,
    14.              NoncharacterCodePoint, DefaultIgnorableCodePoint, Any,
    15.              ASCII, Assigned), but also bidirectional types, blocks, etc.
    16.              (see "Unicode Character Properties")
    17.         [4]  \d \D \s \S \w \W \X [:prop:] [:^prop:]
    18.         [5]  can use regular expression look-ahead [a] or
    19.              user-defined character properties [b] to emulate set operations
    20.         [6]  \b \B
    21.         [7]  note that Perl does Full case-folding in matching, not Simple:
    22.              for example U+1F88 is equivalent to U+1F00 U+03B9,
    23.              not with 1F80.  This difference matters mainly for certain Greek
    24.              capital letters with certain modifiers: the Full case-folding
    25.              decomposes the letter, while the Simple case-folding would map
    26.              it to a single character.
    27.         [8]  should do ^ and $ also on U+000B (\v in C), FF (\f), CR (\r),
    28.              CRLF (\r\n), NEL (U+0085), LS (U+2028), and PS (U+2029);
    29.              should also affect <>, $., and script line numbers;
    30.              should not split lines within CRLF [c] (i.e. there is no empty
    31.              line between \r and \n)
    32.         [9]  UTF-8/UTF-EBDDIC used in perl allows not only U+10000 to U+10FFFF
    33.              but also beyond U+10FFFF [d]

    [a] You can mimic class subtraction using lookahead. For example, what UTS#18 might write as

    1.     [{Greek}-[{UNASSIGNED}]]

    in Perl can be written as:

    1.     (?!\p{Unassigned})\p{InGreekAndCoptic}
    2.         (?=\p{Assigned})\p{InGreekAndCoptic}

    But in this particular example, you probably really want

    1.     \p{GreekAndCoptic}

    which will match assigned characters known to be part of the Greek script.

    Also see the Unicode::Regex::Set module, it does implement the full UTS#18 grouping, intersection, union, and removal (subtraction) syntax.

    [b] '+' for union, '-' for removal (set-difference), '&' for intersection (see User-Defined Character Properties)

    [c] Try the :crlf layer (see PerlIO).

    [d] Avoid use warning 'utf8'; (or say no warning 'utf8'; ) to allow U+FFFF (\x{FFFF} ).

  • Level 2 - Extended Unicode Support

    1.         RL2.1   Canonical Equivalents           - MISSING       [10][11]
    2.         RL2.2   Default Grapheme Clusters       - MISSING       [12][13]
    3.         RL2.3   Default Word Boundaries         - MISSING       [14]
    4.         RL2.4   Default Loose Matches           - MISSING       [15]
    5.         RL2.5   Name Properties                 - MISSING       [16]
    6.         RL2.6   Wildcard Properties             - MISSING
    8.         [10] see UAX#15 "Unicode Normalization Forms"
    9.         [11] have Unicode::Normalize but not integrated to regexes
    10.         [12] have \X but at this level . should equal that
    11.         [13] UAX#29 "Text Boundaries" considers CRLF and Hangul syllable
    12.              clusters as a single grapheme cluster.
    13.         [14] see UAX#29, Word Boundaries
    14.         [15] see UAX#21 "Case Mappings"
    15.         [16] have \N{...} but neither compute names of CJK Ideographs
    16.              and Hangul Syllables nor use a loose match [e]

    [e] \N{...} allows namespaces (see charnames).

  • Level 3 - Tailored Support

    1.         RL3.1   Tailored Punctuation            - MISSING
    2.         RL3.2   Tailored Grapheme Clusters      - MISSING       [17][18]
    3.         RL3.3   Tailored Word Boundaries        - MISSING
    4.         RL3.4   Tailored Loose Matches          - MISSING
    5.         RL3.5   Tailored Ranges                 - MISSING
    6.         RL3.6   Context Matching                - MISSING       [19]
    7.         RL3.7   Incremental Matches             - MISSING
    8.       ( RL3.8   Unicode Set Sharing )
    9.         RL3.9   Possible Match Sets             - MISSING
    10.         RL3.10  Folded Matching                 - MISSING       [20]
    11.         RL3.11  Submatchers                     - MISSING
    13.         [17] see UAX#10 "Unicode Collation Algorithms"
    14.         [18] have Unicode::Collate but not integrated to regexes
    15.         [19] have (?<=x) and (?=x), but look-aheads or look-behinds should see
    16.              outside of the target substring
    17.         [20] need insensitive matching for linguistic features other than case;
    18.              for example, hiragana to katakana, wide and narrow, simplified Han
    19.              to traditional Han (see UTR#30 "Character Foldings")

Unicode Encodings

Unicode characters are assigned to code points, which are abstract numbers. To use these numbers, various encodings are needed.

  • UTF-8

    UTF-8 is a variable-length (1 to 6 bytes, current character allocations require 4 bytes), byte-order independent encoding. For ASCII (and we really do mean 7-bit ASCII, not another 8-bit encoding), UTF-8 is transparent.

    The following table is from Unicode 3.2.

    1.  Code Points            1st Byte  2nd Byte  3rd Byte  4th Byte
    3.    U+0000..U+007F       00..7F
    4.    U+0080..U+07FF       C2..DF    80..BF
    5.    U+0800..U+0FFF       E0        A0..BF    80..BF
    6.    U+1000..U+CFFF       E1..EC    80..BF    80..BF
    7.    U+D000..U+D7FF       ED        80..9F    80..BF
    8.    U+D800..U+DFFF       ******* ill-formed *******
    9.    U+E000..U+FFFF       EE..EF    80..BF    80..BF
    10.   U+10000..U+3FFFF      F0        90..BF    80..BF    80..BF
    11.   U+40000..U+FFFFF      F1..F3    80..BF    80..BF    80..BF
    12.  U+100000..U+10FFFF     F4        80..8F    80..BF    80..BF

    Note the A0..BF in U+0800..U+0FFF, the 80..9F in U+D000...U+D7FF , the 90..B F in U+10000..U+3FFFF, and the 80...8F in U+100000..U+10FFFF. The "gaps" are caused by legal UTF-8 avoiding non-shortest encodings: it is technically possible to UTF-8-encode a single code point in different ways, but that is explicitly forbidden, and the shortest possible encoding should always be used. So that's what Perl does.

    Another way to look at it is via bits:

    1.  Code Points                    1st Byte   2nd Byte  3rd Byte  4th Byte
    3.                     0aaaaaaa     0aaaaaaa
    4.             00000bbbbbaaaaaa     110bbbbb  10aaaaaa
    5.             ccccbbbbbbaaaaaa     1110cccc  10bbbbbb  10aaaaaa
    6.   00000dddccccccbbbbbbaaaaaa     11110ddd  10cccccc  10bbbbbb  10aaaaaa

    As you can see, the continuation bytes all begin with 10 , and the leading bits of the start byte tell how many bytes the are in the encoded character.

  • UTF-EBCDIC

    Like UTF-8 but EBCDIC-safe, in the way that UTF-8 is ASCII-safe.

  • UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, Surrogates, and BOMs (Byte Order Marks)

    The followings items are mostly for reference and general Unicode knowledge, Perl doesn't use these constructs internally.

    UTF-16 is a 2 or 4 byte encoding. The Unicode code points U+0000..U+FFFF are stored in a single 16-bit unit, and the code points U+10000..U+10FFFF in two 16-bit units. The latter case is using surrogates, the first 16-bit unit being the high surrogate, and the second being the low surrogate.

    Surrogates are code points set aside to encode the U+10000..U+10FFFF range of Unicode code points in pairs of 16-bit units. The high surrogates are the range U+D800..U+DBFF , and the low surrogates are the range U+DC00..U+DFFF . The surrogate encoding is

    1. 	$hi = ($uni - 0x10000) / 0x400 + 0xD800;
    2. 	$lo = ($uni - 0x10000) % 0x400 + 0xDC00;

    and the decoding is

    1. 	$uni = 0x10000 + ($hi - 0xD800) * 0x400 + ($lo - 0xDC00);

    If you try to generate surrogates (for example by using chr()), you will get a warning if warnings are turned on, because those code points are not valid for a Unicode character.

    Because of the 16-bitness, UTF-16 is byte-order dependent. UTF-16 itself can be used for in-memory computations, but if storage or transfer is required either UTF-16BE (big-endian) or UTF-16LE (little-endian) encodings must be chosen.

    This introduces another problem: what if you just know that your data is UTF-16, but you don't know which endianness? Byte Order Marks, or BOMs, are a solution to this. A special character has been reserved in Unicode to function as a byte order marker: the character with the code point U+FEFF is the BOM.

    The trick is that if you read a BOM, you will know the byte order, since if it was written on a big-endian platform, you will read the bytes 0xFE 0xFF, but if it was written on a little-endian platform, you will read the bytes 0xFF 0xFE. (And if the originating platform was writing in UTF-8, you will read the bytes 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF.)

    The way this trick works is that the character with the code point U+FFFE is guaranteed not to be a valid Unicode character, so the sequence of bytes 0xFF 0xFE is unambiguously "BOM, represented in little-endian format" and cannot be U+FFFE , represented in big-endian format".

  • UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE

    The UTF-32 family is pretty much like the UTF-16 family, expect that the units are 32-bit, and therefore the surrogate scheme is not needed. The BOM signatures will be 0x00 0x00 0xFE 0xFF for BE and 0xFF 0xFE 0x00 0x00 for LE.

  • UCS-2, UCS-4

    Encodings defined by the ISO 10646 standard. UCS-2 is a 16-bit encoding. Unlike UTF-16, UCS-2 is not extensible beyond U+FFFF , because it does not use surrogates. UCS-4 is a 32-bit encoding, functionally identical to UTF-32.

  • UTF-7

    A seven-bit safe (non-eight-bit) encoding, which is useful if the transport or storage is not eight-bit safe. Defined by RFC 2152.

Security Implications of Unicode

  • Malformed UTF-8

    Unfortunately, the specification of UTF-8 leaves some room for interpretation of how many bytes of encoded output one should generate from one input Unicode character. Strictly speaking, the shortest possible sequence of UTF-8 bytes should be generated, because otherwise there is potential for an input buffer overflow at the receiving end of a UTF-8 connection. Perl always generates the shortest length UTF-8, and with warnings on Perl will warn about non-shortest length UTF-8 along with other malformations, such as the surrogates, which are not real Unicode code points.

  • Regular expressions behave slightly differently between byte data and character (Unicode) data. For example, the "word character" character class \w will work differently depending on if data is eight-bit bytes or Unicode.

    In the first case, the set of \w characters is either small--the default set of alphabetic characters, digits, and the "_"--or, if you are using a locale (see perllocale), the \w might contain a few more letters according to your language and country.

    In the second case, the \w set of characters is much, much larger. Most importantly, even in the set of the first 256 characters, it will probably match different characters: unlike most locales, which are specific to a language and country pair, Unicode classifies all the characters that are letters somewhere as \w . For example, your locale might not think that LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH is a letter (unless you happen to speak Icelandic), but Unicode does.

    As discussed elsewhere, Perl has one foot (two hooves?) planted in each of two worlds: the old world of bytes and the new world of characters, upgrading from bytes to characters when necessary. If your legacy code does not explicitly use Unicode, no automatic switch-over to characters should happen. Characters shouldn't get downgraded to bytes, either. It is possible to accidentally mix bytes and characters, however (see perluniintro), in which case \w in regular expressions might start behaving differently. Review your code. Use warnings and the strict pragma.

Unicode in Perl on EBCDIC

The way Unicode is handled on EBCDIC platforms is still experimental. On such platforms, references to UTF-8 encoding in this document and elsewhere should be read as meaning the UTF-EBCDIC specified in Unicode Technical Report 16, unless ASCII vs. EBCDIC issues are specifically discussed. There is no utfebcdic pragma or ":utfebcdic" layer; rather, "utf8" and ":utf8" are reused to mean the platform's "natural" 8-bit encoding of Unicode. See perlebcdic for more discussion of the issues.

Locales

Usually locale settings and Unicode do not affect each other, but there are a couple of exceptions:

  • You can enable automatic UTF-8-ification of your standard file handles, default open() layer, and @ARGV by using either the -C command line switch or the PERL_UNICODE environment variable, see perlrun for the documentation of the -C switch.

  • Perl tries really hard to work both with Unicode and the old byte-oriented world. Most often this is nice, but sometimes Perl's straddling of the proverbial fence causes problems.

When Unicode Does Not Happen

While Perl does have extensive ways to input and output in Unicode, and few other 'entry points' like the @ARGV which can be interpreted as Unicode (UTF-8), there still are many places where Unicode (in some encoding or another) could be given as arguments or received as results, or both, but it is not.

The following are such interfaces. For all of these interfaces Perl currently (as of 5.8.3) simply assumes byte strings both as arguments and results, or UTF-8 strings if the encoding pragma has been used.

One reason why Perl does not attempt to resolve the role of Unicode in this cases is that the answers are highly dependent on the operating system and the file system(s). For example, whether filenames can be in Unicode, and in exactly what kind of encoding, is not exactly a portable concept. Similarly for the qx and system: how well will the 'command line interface' (and which of them?) handle Unicode?

  • chdir, chmod, chown, chroot, exec, link, lstat, mkdir, rename, rmdir, stat, symlink, truncate, unlink, utime, -X

  • %ENV

  • glob (aka the <*>)

  • open, opendir, sysopen

  • qx (aka the backtick operator), system

  • readdir, readlink

Forcing Unicode in Perl (Or Unforcing Unicode in Perl)

Sometimes (see When Unicode Does Not Happen) there are situations where you simply need to force a byte string into UTF-8, or vice versa. The low-level calls utf8::upgrade($bytestring) and utf8::downgrade($utf8string[, FAIL_OK]) are the answers.

Note that utf8::downgrade() can fail if the string contains characters that don't fit into a byte.

Using Unicode in XS

If you want to handle Perl Unicode in XS extensions, you may find the following C APIs useful. See also Unicode Support in perlguts for an explanation about Unicode at the XS level, and perlapi for the API details.

  • DO_UTF8(sv) returns true if the UTF8 flag is on and the bytes pragma is not in effect. SvUTF8(sv) returns true if the UTF8 flag is on; the bytes pragma is ignored. The UTF8 flag being on does not mean that there are any characters of code points greater than 255 (or 127) in the scalar or that there are even any characters in the scalar. What the UTF8 flag means is that the sequence of octets in the representation of the scalar is the sequence of UTF-8 encoded code points of the characters of a string. The UTF8 flag being off means that each octet in this representation encodes a single character with code point 0..255 within the string. Perl's Unicode model is not to use UTF-8 until it is absolutely necessary.

  • uvchr_to_utf8(buf, chr) writes a Unicode character code point into a buffer encoding the code point as UTF-8, and returns a pointer pointing after the UTF-8 bytes. It works appropriately on EBCDIC machines.

  • utf8_to_uvchr(buf, lenp) reads UTF-8 encoded bytes from a buffer and returns the Unicode character code point and, optionally, the length of the UTF-8 byte sequence. It works appropriately on EBCDIC machines.

  • utf8_length(start, end) returns the length of the UTF-8 encoded buffer in characters. sv_len_utf8(sv) returns the length of the UTF-8 encoded scalar.

  • sv_utf8_upgrade(sv) converts the string of the scalar to its UTF-8 encoded form. sv_utf8_downgrade(sv) does the opposite, if possible. sv_utf8_encode(sv) is like sv_utf8_upgrade except that it does not set the UTF8 flag. sv_utf8_decode() does the opposite of sv_utf8_encode() . Note that none of these are to be used as general-purpose encoding or decoding interfaces: use Encode for that. sv_utf8_upgrade() is affected by the encoding pragma but sv_utf8_downgrade() is not (since the encoding pragma is designed to be a one-way street).

  • is_utf8_char(s) returns true if the pointer points to a valid UTF-8 character.

  • is_utf8_string(buf, len) returns true if len bytes of the buffer are valid UTF-8.

  • UTF8SKIP(buf) will return the number of bytes in the UTF-8 encoded character in the buffer. UNISKIP(chr) will return the number of bytes required to UTF-8-encode the Unicode character code point. UTF8SKIP() is useful for example for iterating over the characters of a UTF-8 encoded buffer; UNISKIP() is useful, for example, in computing the size required for a UTF-8 encoded buffer.

  • utf8_distance(a, b) will tell the distance in characters between the two pointers pointing to the same UTF-8 encoded buffer.

  • utf8_hop(s, off) will return a pointer to a UTF-8 encoded buffer that is off (positive or negative) Unicode characters displaced from the UTF-8 buffer s. Be careful not to overstep the buffer: utf8_hop() will merrily run off the end or the beginning of the buffer if told to do so.

  • pv_uni_display(dsv, spv, len, pvlim, flags) and sv_uni_display(dsv, ssv, pvlim, flags) are useful for debugging the output of Unicode strings and scalars. By default they are useful only for debugging--they display all characters as hexadecimal code points--but with the flags UNI_DISPLAY_ISPRINT , UNI_DISPLAY_BACKSLASH , and UNI_DISPLAY_QQ you can make the output more readable.

  • ibcmp_utf8(s1, pe1, l1, u1, s2, pe2, l2, u2) can be used to compare two strings case-insensitively in Unicode. For case-sensitive comparisons you can just use memEQ() and memNE() as usual.

For more information, see perlapi, and utf8.c and utf8.h in the Perl source code distribution.

BUGS

Interaction with Locales

Use of locales with Unicode data may lead to odd results. Currently, Perl attempts to attach 8-bit locale info to characters in the range 0..255, but this technique is demonstrably incorrect for locales that use characters above that range when mapped into Unicode. Perl's Unicode support will also tend to run slower. Use of locales with Unicode is discouraged.

Problems with characters whose ordinal numbers are in the range 128 - 255 with no Locale specified

Without a locale specified, unlike all other characters or code points, these characters have very different semantics in byte semantics versus character semantics. In character semantics they are interpreted as Unicode code points, which means they are viewed as Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). In byte semantics, they are considered to be unassigned characters, meaning that the only semantics they have is their ordinal numbers, and that they are not members of various character classes. None are considered to match \w for example, but all match \W . Besides these class matches, the known operations that this affects are those that change the case, regular expression matching while ignoring case, and quotemeta(). This can lead to unexpected results in which a string's semantics suddenly change if a code point above 255 is appended to or removed from it, which changes the string's semantics from byte to character or vice versa. This behavior is scheduled to change in version 5.12, but in the meantime, a workaround is to always call utf8::upgrade($string), or to use the standard modules Encode or charnames.

Interaction with Extensions

When Perl exchanges data with an extension, the extension should be able to understand the UTF8 flag and act accordingly. If the extension doesn't know about the flag, it's likely that the extension will return incorrectly-flagged data.

So if you're working with Unicode data, consult the documentation of every module you're using if there are any issues with Unicode data exchange. If the documentation does not talk about Unicode at all, suspect the worst and probably look at the source to learn how the module is implemented. Modules written completely in Perl shouldn't cause problems. Modules that directly or indirectly access code written in other programming languages are at risk.

For affected functions, the simple strategy to avoid data corruption is to always make the encoding of the exchanged data explicit. Choose an encoding that you know the extension can handle. Convert arguments passed to the extensions to that encoding and convert results back from that encoding. Write wrapper functions that do the conversions for you, so you can later change the functions when the extension catches up.

To provide an example, let's say the popular Foo::Bar::escape_html function doesn't deal with Unicode data yet. The wrapper function would convert the argument to raw UTF-8 and convert the result back to Perl's internal representation like so:

  1.     sub my_escape_html ($) {
  2.       my($what) = shift;
  3.       return unless defined $what;
  4.       Encode::decode_utf8(Foo::Bar::escape_html(Encode::encode_utf8($what)));
  5.     }

Sometimes, when the extension does not convert data but just stores and retrieves them, you will be in a position to use the otherwise dangerous Encode::_utf8_on() function. Let's say the popular Foo::Bar extension, written in C, provides a param method that lets you store and retrieve data according to these prototypes:

  1.     $self->param($name, $value);            # set a scalar
  2.     $value = $self->param($name);           # retrieve a scalar

If it does not yet provide support for any encoding, one could write a derived class with such a param method:

  1.     sub param {
  2.       my($self,$name,$value) = @_;
  3.       utf8::upgrade($name);     # make sure it is UTF-8 encoded
  4.       if (defined $value) {
  5.         utf8::upgrade($value);  # make sure it is UTF-8 encoded
  6.         return $self->SUPER::param($name,$value);
  7.       } else {
  8.         my $ret = $self->SUPER::param($name);
  9.         Encode::_utf8_on($ret); # we know, it is UTF-8 encoded
  10.         return $ret;
  11.       }
  12.     }

Some extensions provide filters on data entry/exit points, such as DB_File::filter_store_key and family. Look out for such filters in the documentation of your extensions, they can make the transition to Unicode data much easier.

Speed

Some functions are slower when working on UTF-8 encoded strings than on byte encoded strings. All functions that need to hop over characters such as length(), substr() or index(), or matching regular expressions can work much faster when the underlying data are byte-encoded.

In Perl 5.8.0 the slowness was often quite spectacular; in Perl 5.8.1 a caching scheme was introduced which will hopefully make the slowness somewhat less spectacular, at least for some operations. In general, operations with UTF-8 encoded strings are still slower. As an example, the Unicode properties (character classes) like \p{Nd} are known to be quite a bit slower (5-20 times) than their simpler counterparts like \d (then again, there 268 Unicode characters matching Nd compared with the 10 ASCII characters matching d ).

Possible problems on EBCDIC platforms

In earlier versions, when byte and character data were concatenated, the new string was sometimes created by decoding the byte strings as ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), even if the old Unicode string used EBCDIC.

If you find any of these, please report them as bugs.

Porting code from perl-5.6.X

Perl 5.8 has a different Unicode model from 5.6. In 5.6 the programmer was required to use the utf8 pragma to declare that a given scope expected to deal with Unicode data and had to make sure that only Unicode data were reaching that scope. If you have code that is working with 5.6, you will need some of the following adjustments to your code. The examples are written such that the code will continue to work under 5.6, so you should be safe to try them out.

  • A filehandle that should read or write UTF-8

    1.   if ($] > 5.007) {
    2.     binmode $fh, ":encoding(utf8)";
    3.   }

  • A scalar that is going to be passed to some extension

    Be it Compress::Zlib, Apache::Request or any extension that has no mention of Unicode in the manpage, you need to make sure that the UTF8 flag is stripped off. Note that at the time of this writing (October 2002) the mentioned modules are not UTF-8-aware. Please check the documentation to verify if this is still true.

    1.   if ($] > 5.007) {
    2.     require Encode;
    3.     $val = Encode::encode_utf8($val); # make octets
    4.   }

  • A scalar we got back from an extension

    If you believe the scalar comes back as UTF-8, you will most likely want the UTF8 flag restored:

    1.   if ($] > 5.007) {
    2.     require Encode;
    3.     $val = Encode::decode_utf8($val);
    4.   }

  • Same thing, if you are really sure it is UTF-8

    1.   if ($] > 5.007) {
    2.     require Encode;
    3.     Encode::_utf8_on($val);
    4.   }

  • A wrapper for fetchrow_array and fetchrow_hashref

    When the database contains only UTF-8, a wrapper function or method is a convenient way to replace all your fetchrow_array and fetchrow_hashref calls. A wrapper function will also make it easier to adapt to future enhancements in your database driver. Note that at the time of this writing (October 2002), the DBI has no standardized way to deal with UTF-8 data. Please check the documentation to verify if that is still true.

    1.   sub fetchrow {
    2.     my($self, $sth, $what) = @_; # $what is one of fetchrow_{array,hashref}
    3.     if ($] < 5.007) {
    4.       return $sth->$what;
    5.     } else {
    6.       require Encode;
    7.       if (wantarray) {
    8.         my @arr = $sth->$what;
    9.         for (@arr) {
    10.           defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_);
    11.         }
    12.         return @arr;
    13.       } else {
    14.         my $ret = $sth->$what;
    15.         if (ref $ret) {
    16.           for my $k (keys %$ret) {
    17.             defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_) for $ret->{$k};
    18.           }
    19.           return $ret;
    20.         } else {
    21.           defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_) for $ret;
    22.           return $ret;
    23.         }
    24.       }
    25.     }
    26.   }

  • A large scalar that you know can only contain ASCII

    Scalars that contain only ASCII and are marked as UTF-8 are sometimes a drag to your program. If you recognize such a situation, just remove the UTF8 flag:

    1.   utf8::downgrade($val) if $] > 5.007;

SEE ALSO

perlunitut, perluniintro, Encode, open, utf8, bytes, perlretut, ${^UNICODE} in perlvar

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