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



NAME
       perluniintro - Perl Unicode introduction

DESCRIPTION
       This document gives a general idea of Unicode and how to use Unicode in Perl.

   Unicode
       Unicode is a character set standard which plans to codify all of the writing systems of the world,
       plus many other symbols.

       Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 are coordinated standards that provide code points for characters in almost
       all modern character set standards, covering more than 30 writing systems and hundreds of languages,
       including all commercially-important modern languages.  All characters in the largest Chinese,
       Japanese, and Korean dictionaries are also encoded. The standards will eventually cover almost all
       characters in more than 250 writing systems and thousands of languages.  Unicode 1.0 was released in
       October 1991, and 4.0 in April 2003.

       A Unicode character is an abstract entity.  It is not bound to any particular integer width,
       especially not to the C language "char".  Unicode is language-neutral and display-neutral: it does
       not encode the language of the text, and it does not generally define fonts or other graphical layout
       details.  Unicode operates on characters and on text built from those characters.

       Unicode defines characters like "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" or "GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA" and unique
       numbers for the characters, in this case 0x0041 and 0x03B1, respectively.  These unique numbers are
       called code points.

       The Unicode standard prefers using hexadecimal notation for the code points.  If numbers like 0x0041
       are unfamiliar to you, take a peek at a later section, "Hexadecimal Notation".  The Unicode standard
       uses the notation "U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A", to give the hexadecimal code point and the
       normative name of the character.

       Unicode also defines various properties for the characters, like "uppercase" or "lowercase", "decimal
       digit", or "punctuation"; these properties are independent of the names of the characters.
       Furthermore, various operations on the characters like uppercasing, lowercasing, and collating
       (sorting) are defined.

       A Unicode logical "character" can actually consist of more than one internal actual "character" or
       code point.  For Western languages, this is adequately modelled by a base character (like "LATIN
       CAPITAL LETTER A") followed by one or more modifiers (like "COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT").  This sequence
       of base character and modifiers is called a combining character sequence.  Some non-western languages
       require more complicated models, so Unicode created the grapheme cluster concept, and then the
       extended grapheme cluster.  For example, a Korean Hangul syllable is considered a single logical
       character, but most often consists of three actual Unicode characters: a leading consonant followed
       by an interior vowel followed by a trailing consonant.

       Whether to call these extended grapheme clusters "characters" depends on your point of view. If you
       are a programmer, you probably would tend towards seeing each element in the sequences as one unit,
       or "character".  The whole sequence could be seen as one "character", however, from the user's point
       of view, since that's probably what it looks like in the context of the user's language.

       With this "whole sequence" view of characters, the total number of characters is open-ended. But in
       the programmer's "one unit is one character" point of view, the concept of "characters" is more
       deterministic.  In this document, we take that second point of view: one "character" is one Unicode
       code point.

       For some combinations, there are precomposed characters.  "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE", for
       example, is defined as a single code point.  These precomposed characters are, however, only
       available for some combinations, and are mainly meant to support round-trip conversions between
       Unicode and legacy standards (like the ISO 8859).  In the general case, the composing method is more
       extensible.  To support conversion between different compositions of the characters, various
       normalization forms to standardize representations are also defined.

       Because of backward compatibility with legacy encodings, the "a unique number for every character"
       idea breaks down a bit: instead, there is "at least one number for every character".  The same
       character could be represented differently in several legacy encodings.  The converse is also not
       true: some code points do not have an assigned character.  Firstly, there are unallocated code points
       within otherwise used blocks.  Secondly, there are special Unicode control characters that do not
       represent true characters.

       A common myth about Unicode is that it is "16-bit", that is, Unicode is only represented as 0x10000
       (or 65536) characters from 0x0000 to 0xFFFF.  This is untrue.  Since Unicode 2.0 (July 1996), Unicode
       has been defined all the way up to 21 bits (0x10FFFF), and since Unicode 3.1 (March 2001), characters
       have been defined beyond 0xFFFF.  The first 0x10000 characters are called the Plane _, or the Basic
       Multilingual Plane (BMP).  With Unicode 3.1, 17 (yes, seventeen) planes in all were defined--but they
       are nowhere near full of defined characters, yet.

       Another myth is about Unicode blocks--that they have something to do with languages--that each block
       would define the characters used by a language or a set of languages.  This is also untrue.  The
       division into blocks exists, but it is almost completely accidental--an artifact of how the
       characters have been and still are allocated.  Instead, there is a concept called scripts, which is
       more useful: there is "Latin" script, "Greek" script, and so on.  Scripts usually span varied parts
       of several blocks.  For more information about scripts, see "Scripts" in perlunicode.

       The Unicode code points are just abstract numbers.  To input and output these abstract numbers, the
       numbers must be encoded or serialised somehow.  Unicode defines several character encoding forms, of
       which UTF-8 is perhaps the most popular.  UTF-8 is a variable length encoding that encodes Unicode
       characters as 1 to 6 bytes.  Other encodings include UTF-16 and UTF-32 and their big- and little-endian littleendian
       endian variants (UTF-8 is byte-order independent) The ISO/IEC 10646 defines the UCS-2 and UCS-4
       encoding forms.

       For more information about encodings--for instance, to learn what surrogates and byte order marks
       (BOMs) are--see perlunicode.

   Perl's Unicode Support
       Starting from Perl 5.6.0, Perl has had the capacity to handle Unicode natively.  Perl 5.8.0, however,
       is the first recommended release for serious Unicode work.  The maintenance release 5.6.1 fixed many
       of the problems of the initial Unicode implementation, but for example regular expressions still do
       not work with Unicode in 5.6.1.

       Starting from Perl 5.8.0, the use of "use utf8" is needed only in much more restricted circumstances.
       In earlier releases the "utf8" pragma was used to declare that operations in the current block or
       file would be Unicode-aware.  This model was found to be wrong, or at least clumsy: the "Unicodeness"
       is now carried with the data, instead of being attached to the operations.  Only one case remains
       where an explicit "use utf8" is needed: if your Perl script itself is encoded in UTF-8, you can use
       UTF-8 in your identifier names, and in string and regular expression literals, by saying "use utf8".
       This is not the default because scripts with legacy 8-bit data in them would break.  See utf8.

   Perl's Unicode Model
       Perl supports both pre-5.6 strings of eight-bit native bytes, and strings of Unicode characters.  The
       principle is that Perl tries to keep its data as eight-bit bytes for as long as possible, but as soon
       as Unicodeness cannot be avoided, the data is (mostly) transparently upgraded to Unicode.  There are
       some problems--see "The "Unicode Bug"" in perlunicode.

       Internally, Perl currently uses either whatever the native eight-bit character set of the platform
       (for example Latin-1) is, defaulting to UTF-8, to encode Unicode strings. Specifically, if all code
       points in the string are 0xFF or less, Perl uses the native eight-bit character set.  Otherwise, it
       uses UTF-8.

       A user of Perl does not normally need to know nor care how Perl happens to encode its internal
       strings, but it becomes relevant when outputting Unicode strings to a stream without a PerlIO layer
       (one with the "default" encoding).  In such a case, the raw bytes used internally (the native
       character set or UTF-8, as appropriate for each string) will be used, and a "Wide character" warning
       will be issued if those strings contain a character beyond 0x00FF.

       For example,

             perl -e 'print "\x{DF}\n", "\x{0100}\x{DF}\n"'

       produces a fairly useless mixture of native bytes and UTF-8, as well as a warning:

            Wide character in print at ...

       To output UTF-8, use the ":encoding" or ":utf8" output layer.  Prepending

             binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");

       to this sample program ensures that the output is completely UTF-8, and removes the program's
       warning.

       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.

       Note that this means that Perl expects other software to work, too: if Perl has been led to believe
       that STDIN should be UTF-8, but then STDIN coming in from another command is not UTF-8, Perl will
       complain about the malformed UTF-8.

       All features that combine Unicode and I/O also require using the new PerlIO feature.  Almost all Perl
       5.8 platforms do use PerlIO, though: you can see whether yours is by running "perl -V" and looking
       for "useperlio=define".

   Unicode and EBCDIC
       Perl 5.8.0 also supports Unicode on EBCDIC platforms.  There, Unicode support is somewhat more
       complex to implement since additional conversions are needed at every step.

       Later Perl releases have added code that will not work on EBCDIC platforms, and no one has
       complained, so the divergence has continued.  If you want to run Perl on an EBCDIC platform, send
       email to perlbug@perl.org

       On EBCDIC platforms, the internal Unicode encoding form is UTF-EBCDIC instead of UTF-8.  The
       difference is that as UTF-8 is "ASCII-safe" in that ASCII characters encode to UTF-8 as-is, while
       UTF-EBCDIC is "EBCDIC-safe".

   Creating Unicode
       To create Unicode characters in literals for code points above 0xFF, use the "\x{...}" notation in
       double-quoted strings:

           my $smiley = "\x{263a}";

       Similarly, it can be used in regular expression literals

           $smiley =~ /\x{263a}/;

       At run-time you can use "chr()":

           my $hebrew_alef = chr(0x05d0);

       See "Further Resources" for how to find all these numeric codes.

       Naturally, "ord()" will do the reverse: it turns a character into a code point.

       Note that "\x.." (no "{}" and only two hexadecimal digits), "\x{...}", and "chr(...)" for arguments
       less than 0x100 (decimal 256) generate an eight-bit character for backward compatibility with older
       Perls.  For arguments of 0x100 or more, Unicode characters are always produced. If you want to force
       the production of Unicode characters regardless of the numeric value, use "pack("U", ...)"  instead
       of "\x..", "\x{...}", or "chr()".

       You can also use the "charnames" pragma to invoke characters by name in double-quoted strings:

           use charnames ':full';
           my $arabic_alef = "\N{ARABIC LETTER ALEF}";

       And, as mentioned above, you can also "pack()" numbers into Unicode characters:

          my $georgian_an  = pack("U", 0x10a0);

       Note that both "\x{...}" and "\N{...}" are compile-time string constants: you cannot use variables in
       them.  if you want similar run-time functionality, use "chr()" and "charnames::vianame()".

       If you want to force the result to Unicode characters, use the special "U0" prefix.  It consumes no
       arguments but causes the following bytes to be interpreted as the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode
       characters:

          my $chars = pack("U0W*", 0x80, 0x42);

       Likewise, you can stop such UTF-8 interpretation by using the special "C0" prefix.

   Handling Unicode
       Handling Unicode is for the most part transparent: just use the strings as usual.  Functions like
       "index()", "length()", and "substr()" will work on the Unicode characters; regular expressions will
       work on the Unicode characters (see perlunicode and perlretut).

       Note that Perl considers grapheme clusters to be separate characters, so for example

           use charnames ':full';
           print length("\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A}\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT}"), "\n";

       will print 2, not 1.  The only exception is that regular expressions have "\X" for matching an
       extended grapheme cluster.

       Life is not quite so transparent, however, when working with legacy encodings, I/O, and certain
       special cases:

   Legacy Encodings
       When you combine legacy data and Unicode the legacy data needs to be upgraded to Unicode.  Normally
       ISO 8859-1 (or EBCDIC, if applicable) is assumed.

       The "Encode" module knows about many encodings and has interfaces for doing conversions between those
       encodings:

           use Encode 'decode';
           $data = decode("iso-8859-3", $data); # convert from legacy to utf-8

   Unicode I/O
       Normally, writing out Unicode data

           print FH $some_string_with_unicode, "\n";

       produces raw bytes that Perl happens to use to internally encode the Unicode string.  Perl's internal
       encoding depends on the system as well as what characters happen to be in the string at the time. If
       any of the characters are at code points 0x100 or above, you will get a warning.  To ensure that the
       output is explicitly rendered in the encoding you desire--and to avoid the warning--open the stream
       with the desired encoding. Some examples:

           open FH, ">:utf8", "file";

           open FH, ">:encoding(ucs2)",      "file";
           open FH, ">:encoding(UTF-8)",     "file";
           open FH, ">:encoding(shift_jis)", "file";

       and on already open streams, use "binmode()":

           binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");

           binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(ucs2)");
           binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)");
           binmode(STDOUT, ":encoding(shift_jis)");

       The matching of encoding names is loose: case does not matter, and many encodings have several
       aliases.  Note that the ":utf8" layer must always be specified exactly like that; it is not subject
       to the loose matching of encoding names. Also note that ":utf8" is unsafe for input, because it
       accepts the data without validating that it is indeed valid UTF8.

       See PerlIO for the ":utf8" layer, PerlIO::encoding and Encode::PerlIO for the ":encoding()" layer,
       and Encode::Supported for many encodings supported by the "Encode" module.

       Reading in a file that you know happens to be encoded in one of the Unicode or legacy encodings does
       not magically turn the data into Unicode in Perl's eyes.  To do that, specify the appropriate layer
       when opening files

           open(my $fh,'<:encoding(utf8)', 'anything');
           my $line_of_unicode = <$fh>;

           open(my $fh,'<:encoding(Big5)', 'anything');
           my $line_of_unicode = <$fh>;

       The I/O layers can also be specified more flexibly with the "open" pragma.  See open, or look at the
       following example.

           use open ':encoding(utf8)'; # input/output default encoding will be UTF-8
           open X, ">file";
           print X chr(0x100), "\n";
           close X;
           open Y, "<file";
           printf "%#x\n", ord(<Y>); # this should print 0x100
           close Y;

       With the "open" pragma you can use the ":locale" layer

           BEGIN { $ENV{LC_ALL} = $ENV{LANG} = 'ru_RU.KOI8-R' }
           # the :locale will probe the locale environment variables like LC_ALL
           use open OUT => ':locale'; # russki parusski
           open(O, ">koi8");
           print O chr(0x430); # Unicode CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A = KOI8-R 0xc1
           close O;
           open(I, "<koi8");
           printf "%#x\n", ord(<I>), "\n"; # this should print 0xc1
           close I;

       These methods install a transparent filter on the I/O stream that converts data from the specified
       encoding when it is read in from the stream.  The result is always Unicode.

       The open pragma affects all the "open()" calls after the pragma by setting default layers.  If you
       want to affect only certain streams, use explicit layers directly in the "open()" call.

       You can switch encodings on an already opened stream by using "binmode()"; see "binmode" in perlfunc.

       The ":locale" does not currently (as of Perl 5.8.0) work with "open()" and "binmode()", only with the
       "open" pragma.  The ":utf8" and ":encoding(...)" methods do work with all of "open()", "binmode()",
       and the "open" pragma.

       Similarly, you may use these I/O layers on output streams to automatically convert Unicode to the
       specified encoding when it is written to the stream. For example, the following snippet copies the
       contents of the file "text.jis" (encoded as ISO-2022-JP, aka JIS) to the file "text.utf8", encoded as
       UTF-8:

           open(my $nihongo, '<:encoding(iso-2022-jp)', 'text.jis');
           open(my $unicode, '>:utf8',                  'text.utf8');
           while (<$nihongo>) { print $unicode $_ }

       The naming of encodings, both by the "open()" and by the "open" pragma allows for flexible names:
       "koi8-r" and "KOI8R" will both be understood.

       Common encodings recognized by ISO, MIME, IANA, and various other standardisation organisations are
       recognised; for a more detailed list see Encode::Supported.

       "read()" reads characters and returns the number of characters.  "seek()" and "tell()" operate on
       byte counts, as do "sysread()" and "sysseek()".

       Notice that because of the default behaviour of not doing any conversion upon input if there is no
       default layer, it is easy to mistakenly write code that keeps on expanding a file by repeatedly
       encoding the data:

           # BAD CODE WARNING
           open F, "file";
           local $/; ## read in the whole file of 8-bit characters
           $t = <F>;
           close F;
           open F, ">:encoding(utf8)", "file";
           print F $t; ## convert to UTF-8 on output
           close F;

       If you run this code twice, the contents of the file will be twice UTF-8 encoded.  A "use open
       ':encoding(utf8)'" would have avoided the bug, or explicitly opening also the file for input as
       UTF-8.

       NOTE: the ":utf8" and ":encoding" features work only if your Perl has been built with the new PerlIO
       feature (which is the default on most systems).

   Displaying Unicode As Text
       Sometimes you might want to display Perl scalars containing Unicode as simple ASCII (or EBCDIC) text.
       The following subroutine converts its argument so that Unicode characters with code points greater
       than 255 are displayed as "\x{...}", control characters (like "\n") are displayed as "\x..", and the
       rest of the characters as themselves:

          sub nice_string {
              join("",
                map { $_ > 255 ?                  # if wide character...
                      sprintf("\\x{%04X}", $_) :  # \x{...}
                      chr($_) =~ /[[:cntrl:]]/ ?  # else if control character ...
                      sprintf("\\x%02X", $_) :    # \x..
                      quotemeta(chr($_))          # else quoted or as themselves
                } unpack("W*", $_[0]));           # unpack Unicode characters
          }

       For example,

          nice_string("foo\x{100}bar\n")

       returns the string

          'foo\x{0100}bar\x0A'

       which is ready to be printed.

   Special Cases
       •   Bit Complement Operator ~ And vec()

           The bit complement operator "~" may produce surprising results if used on strings containing
           characters with ordinal values above 255. In such a case, the results are consistent with the
           internal encoding of the characters, but not with much else. So don't do that. Similarly for
           "vec()": you will be operating on the internally-encoded bit patterns of the Unicode characters,
           not on the code point values, which is very probably not what you want.

       •   Peeking At Perl's Internal Encoding

           Normal users of Perl should never care how Perl encodes any particular Unicode string (because
           the normal ways to get at the contents of a string with Unicode--via input and output--should
           always be via explicitly-defined I/O layers). But if you must, there are two ways of looking
           behind the scenes.

           One way of peeking inside the internal encoding of Unicode characters is to use "unpack("C*",
           ..." to get the bytes of whatever the string encoding happens to be, or "unpack("U0..", ...)" to
           get the bytes of the UTF-8 encoding:

               # this prints  c4 80  for the UTF-8 bytes 0xc4 0x80
               print join(" ", unpack("U0(H2)*", pack("U", 0x100))), "\n";

           Yet another way would be to use the Devel::Peek module:

               perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump(chr(0x100))'

           That shows the "UTF8" flag in FLAGS and both the UTF-8 bytes and Unicode characters in "PV".  See
           also later in this document the discussion about the "utf8::is_utf8()" function.

   Advanced Topics
       •   String Equivalence

           The question of string equivalence turns somewhat complicated in Unicode: what do you mean by
           "equal"?

           (Is "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE" equal to "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A"?)

           The short answer is that by default Perl compares equivalence ("eq", "ne") based only on code
           points of the characters.  In the above case, the answer is no (because 0x00C1 != 0x0041).  But
           sometimes, any CAPITAL LETTER As should be considered equal, or even As of any case.

           The long answer is that you need to consider character normalization and casing issues: see
           Unicode::Normalize, Unicode Technical Report #15, Unicode Normalization Forms
           <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr15> and sections on case mapping in the Unicode
           Standard <http://www.unicode.org>.

           As of Perl 5.8.0, the "Full" case-folding of Case Mappings/SpecialCasing is implemented, but bugs
           remain in "qr//i" with them.

       •   String Collation

           People like to see their strings nicely sorted--or as Unicode parlance goes, collated.  But
           again, what do you mean by collate?

           (Does "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE" come before or after "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH
           GRAVE"?)

           The short answer is that by default, Perl compares strings ("lt", "le", "cmp", "ge", "gt") based
           only on the code points of the characters.  In the above case, the answer is "after", since
           0x00C1 > 0x00C0.

           The long answer is that "it depends", and a good answer cannot be given without knowing (at the
           very least) the language context.  See Unicode::Collate, and Unicode Collation Algorithm
           <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr10/>

   Miscellaneous
       •   Character Ranges and Classes

           Character ranges in regular expression bracketed character classes ( e.g., "/[a-z]/") and in the
           "tr///" (also known as "y///") operator are not magically Unicode-aware.  What this means is that
           "[A-Za-z]" will not magically start to mean "all alphabetic letters" (not that it does mean that
           even for 8-bit characters; for those, if you are using locales (perllocale), use "/[[:alpha:]]/";
           and if not, use the 8-bit-aware property "\p{alpha}").

           All the properties that begin with "\p" (and its inverse "\P") are actually character classes
           that are Unicode-aware.  There are dozens of them, see perluniprops.

           You can use Unicode code points as the end points of character ranges, and the range will include
           all Unicode code points that lie between those end points.

       •   String-To-Number Conversions

           Unicode does define several other decimal--and numeric--characters besides the familiar 0 to 9,
           such as the Arabic and Indic digits.  Perl does not support string-to-number conversion for
           digits other than ASCII 0 to 9 (and ASCII a to f for hexadecimal).

   Questions With Answers
       •   Will My Old Scripts Break?

           Very probably not.  Unless you are generating Unicode characters somehow, old behaviour should be
           preserved.  About the only behaviour that has changed and which could start generating Unicode is
           the old behaviour of "chr()" where supplying an argument more than 255 produced a character
           modulo 255.  "chr(300)", for example, was equal to "chr(45)" or "-" (in ASCII), now it is LATIN
           CAPITAL LETTER I WITH BREVE.

       •   How Do I Make My Scripts Work With Unicode?

           Very little work should be needed since nothing changes until you generate Unicode data.  The
           most important thing is getting input as Unicode; for that, see the earlier I/O discussion.

       •   How Do I Know Whether My String Is In Unicode?

           You shouldn't have to care.  But you may, because currently the semantics of the characters whose
           ordinals are in the range 128 to 255 are different depending on whether the string they are
           contained within is in Unicode or not.  (See "When Unicode Does Not Happen" in perlunicode.)

           To determine if a string is in Unicode, use:

               print utf8::is_utf8($string) ? 1 : 0, "\n";

           But note that this doesn't mean that any of the characters in the string are necessary UTF-8
           encoded, or that any of the characters have code points greater than 0xFF (255) or even 0x80
           (128), or that the string has any characters at all.  All the "is_utf8()" does is to return the
           value of the internal "utf8ness" flag attached to the $string.  If the flag is off, the bytes in
           the scalar are interpreted as a single byte encoding.  If the flag is on, the bytes in the scalar
           are interpreted as the (variable-length, potentially multi-byte) UTF-8 encoded code points of the
           characters.  Bytes added to a UTF-8 encoded string are automatically upgraded to UTF-8.  If mixed
           non-UTF-8 and UTF-8 scalars are merged (double-quoted interpolation, explicit concatenation, and
           printf/sprintf parameter substitution), the result will be UTF-8 encoded as if copies of the byte
           strings were upgraded to UTF-8: for example,

               $a = "ab\x80c";
               $b = "\x{100}";
               print "$a = $b\n";

           the output string will be UTF-8-encoded "ab\x80c = \x{100}\n", but $a will stay byte-encoded.

           Sometimes you might really need to know the byte length of a string instead of the character
           length. For that use either the "Encode::encode_utf8()" function or the "bytes" pragma  and the
           "length()" function:

               my $unicode = chr(0x100);
               print length($unicode), "\n"; # will print 1
               require Encode;
               print length(Encode::encode_utf8($unicode)), "\n"; # will print 2
               use bytes;
               print length($unicode), "\n"; # will also print 2
                                             # (the 0xC4 0x80 of the UTF-8)
               no bytes;

       •   How Do I Detect Data That's Not Valid In a Particular Encoding?

           Use the "Encode" package to try converting it.  For example,

               use Encode 'decode_utf8';

               if (eval { decode_utf8($string, Encode::FB_CROAK); 1 }) {
                   # $string is valid utf8
               } else {
                   # $string is not valid utf8
               }

           Or use "unpack" to try decoding it:

               use warnings;
               @chars = unpack("C0U*", $string_of_bytes_that_I_think_is_utf8);

           If invalid, a "Malformed UTF-8 character" warning is produced. The "C0" means "process the string
           character per character".  Without that, the "unpack("U*", ...)" would work in "U0" mode (the
           default if the format string starts with "U") and it would return the bytes making up the UTF-8
           encoding of the target string, something that will always work.

       •   How Do I Convert Binary Data Into a Particular Encoding, Or Vice Versa?

           This probably isn't as useful as you might think.  Normally, you shouldn't need to.

           In one sense, what you are asking doesn't make much sense: encodings are for characters, and
           binary data are not "characters", so converting "data" into some encoding isn't meaningful unless
           you know in what character set and encoding the binary data is in, in which case it's not just
           binary data, now is it?

           If you have a raw sequence of bytes that you know should be interpreted via a particular
           encoding, you can use "Encode":

               use Encode 'from_to';
               from_to($data, "iso-8859-1", "utf-8"); # from latin-1 to utf-8

           The call to "from_to()" changes the bytes in $data, but nothing material about the nature of the
           string has changed as far as Perl is concerned.  Both before and after the call, the string $data
           contains just a bunch of 8-bit bytes. As far as Perl is concerned, the encoding of the string
           remains as "system-native 8-bit bytes".

           You might relate this to a fictional 'Translate' module:

              use Translate;
              my $phrase = "Yes";
              Translate::from_to($phrase, 'english', 'deutsch');
              ## phrase now contains "Ja"

           The contents of the string changes, but not the nature of the string.  Perl doesn't know any more
           after the call than before that the contents of the string indicates the affirmative.

           Back to converting data.  If you have (or want) data in your system's native 8-bit encoding (e.g.
           Latin-1, EBCDIC, etc.), you can use pack/unpack to convert to/from Unicode.

               $native_string  = pack("W*", unpack("U*", $Unicode_string));
               $Unicode_string = pack("U*", unpack("W*", $native_string));

           If you have a sequence of bytes you know is valid UTF-8, but Perl doesn't know it yet, you can
           make Perl a believer, too:

               use Encode 'decode_utf8';
               $Unicode = decode_utf8($bytes);

           or:

               $Unicode = pack("U0a*", $bytes);

           You can find the bytes that make up a UTF-8 sequence with

                   @bytes = unpack("C*", $Unicode_string)

           and you can create well-formed Unicode with

                   $Unicode_string = pack("U*", 0xff, ...)

       •   How Do I Display Unicode?  How Do I Input Unicode?

           See <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/> and <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html>

       •   How Does Unicode Work With Traditional Locales?

           In Perl, not very well.  Avoid using locales through the "locale" pragma.  Use only one or the
           other.  But see perlrun for the description of the "-C" switch and its environment counterpart,
           $ENV{PERL_UNICODE} to see how to enable various Unicode features, for example by using locale
           settings.

   Hexadecimal Notation
       The Unicode standard prefers using hexadecimal notation because that more clearly shows the division
       of Unicode into blocks of 256 characters.  Hexadecimal is also simply shorter than decimal.  You can
       use decimal notation, too, but learning to use hexadecimal just makes life easier with the Unicode
       standard.  The "U+HHHH" notation uses hexadecimal, for example.

       The "0x" prefix means a hexadecimal number, the digits are 0-9 and a-f (or A-F, case doesn't matter).
       Each hexadecimal digit represents four bits, or half a byte.  "print 0x..., "\n"" will show a
       hexadecimal number in decimal, and "printf "%x\n", $decimal" will show a decimal number in
       hexadecimal.  If you have just the "hex digits" of a hexadecimal number, you can use the "hex()"
       function.

           print 0x0009, "\n";    # 9
           print 0x000a, "\n";    # 10
           print 0x000f, "\n";    # 15
           print 0x0010, "\n";    # 16
           print 0x0011, "\n";    # 17
           print 0x0100, "\n";    # 256

           print 0x0041, "\n";    # 65

           printf "%x\n",  65;    # 41
           printf "%#x\n", 65;    # 0x41

           print hex("41"), "\n"; # 65

   Further Resources
       •   Unicode Consortium

           <http://www.unicode.org/>

       •   Unicode FAQ

           <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/>

       •   Unicode Glossary

           <http://www.unicode.org/glossary/>

       •   Unicode Useful Resources

           <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/onlinedat/resources.html>

       •   Unicode and Multilingual Support in HTML, Fonts, Web Browsers and Other Applications

           <http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/>

       •   UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux

           <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html>

       •   Legacy Character Sets

           <http://www.czyborra.com/> <http://www.eki.ee/letter/>

       •   The Unicode support files live within the Perl installation in the directory

               $Config{installprivlib}/unicore

           in Perl 5.8.0 or newer, and

               $Config{installprivlib}/unicode

           in the Perl 5.6 series.  (The renaming to lib/unicore was done to avoid naming conflicts with
           lib/Unicode in case-insensitive filesystems.)  The main Unicode data file is UnicodeData.txt (or
           Unicode.3_1 in Perl 5.6.1.)  You can find the $Config{installprivlib} by

               perl "-V:installprivlib"

           You can explore various information from the Unicode data files using the "Unicode::UCD" module.

UNICODE IN OLDER PERLS
       If you cannot upgrade your Perl to 5.8.0 or later, you can still do some Unicode processing by using
       the modules "Unicode::String", "Unicode::Map8", and "Unicode::Map", available from CPAN.  If you have
       the GNU recode installed, you can also use the Perl front-end "Convert::Recode" for character
       conversions.

       The following are fast conversions from ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) bytes to UTF-8 bytes and back, the code
       works even with older Perl 5 versions.

           # ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8
           s/([\x80-\xFF])/chr(0xC0|ord($1)>>6).chr(0x80|ord($1)&0x3F)/eg;

           # UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1
           s/([\xC2\xC3])([\x80-\xBF])/chr(ord($1)<<6&0xC0|ord($2)&0x3F)/eg;

SEE ALSO
       perlunitut, perlunicode, Encode, open, utf8, bytes, perlretut, perlrun, Unicode::Collate,
       Unicode::Normalize, Unicode::UCD

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

AUTHOR, COPYRIGHT, AND LICENSE
       Copyright 2001-2002 Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>

       This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.



perl v5.12.5                                     2012-11-03                                  PERLUNIINTRO(1)