3 $utf8::hint_bits = 0x00800000;
8 $^H |= $utf8::hint_bits;
12 $^H &= ~$utf8::hint_bits;
16 require "utf8_heavy.pl";
17 goto &$AUTOLOAD if defined &$AUTOLOAD;
19 Carp::croak("Undefined subroutine $AUTOLOAD called");
27 utf8 - Perl pragma to enable/disable UTF-8 (or UTF-EBCDIC) in source code
34 # Convert the internal representation of a Perl scalar to/from UTF-8.
36 $num_octets = utf8::upgrade($string);
37 $success = utf8::downgrade($string[, $fail_ok]);
39 # Change each character of a Perl scalar to/from a series of
40 # characters that represent the UTF-8 bytes of each original character.
42 utf8::encode($string); # "\x{100}" becomes "\xc4\x80"
43 utf8::decode($string); # "\xc4\x80" becomes "\x{100}"
45 # Convert a code point from the platform native character set to
46 # Unicode, and vice-versa.
47 $unicode = utf8::native_to_unicode(ord('A')); # returns 65 on both
50 $native = utf8::unicode_to_native(65); # returns 65 on ASCII
54 $flag = utf8::is_utf8($string); # since Perl 5.8.1
55 $flag = utf8::valid($string);
59 The C<use utf8> pragma tells the Perl parser to allow UTF-8 in the
60 program text in the current lexical scope. The C<no utf8> pragma tells Perl
61 to switch back to treating the source text as literal bytes in the current
62 lexical scope. (On EBCDIC platforms, technically it is allowing UTF-EBCDIC,
63 and not UTF-8, but this distinction is academic, so in this document the term
64 UTF-8 is used to mean both).
66 B<Do not use this pragma for anything else than telling Perl that your
67 script is written in UTF-8.> The utility functions described below are
68 directly usable without C<use utf8;>.
70 Because it is not possible to reliably tell UTF-8 from native 8 bit
71 encodings, you need either a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of your
72 source code, or C<use utf8;>, to instruct perl.
74 When UTF-8 becomes the standard source format, this pragma will
75 effectively become a no-op.
77 See also the effects of the C<-C> switch and its cousin, the
78 C<PERL_UNICODE> environment variable, in L<perlrun>.
80 Enabling the C<utf8> pragma has the following effect:
86 Bytes in the source text that are not in the ASCII character set will be
87 treated as being part of a literal UTF-8 sequence. This includes most
88 literals such as identifier names, string constants, and constant
89 regular expression patterns.
93 Note that if you have non-ASCII, non-UTF-8 bytes in your script (for example
94 embedded Latin-1 in your string literals), C<use utf8> will be unhappy. If
95 you want to have such bytes under C<use utf8>, you can disable this pragma
96 until the end the block (or file, if at top level) by C<no utf8;>.
98 =head2 Utility functions
100 The following functions are defined in the C<utf8::> package by the
101 Perl core. You do not need to say C<use utf8> to use these and in fact
102 you should not say that unless you really want to have UTF-8 source code.
106 =item * C<$num_octets = utf8::upgrade($string)>
109 Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from an octet
110 sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC) to UTF-8. The
111 logical character sequence itself is unchanged. If I<$string> is already
112 upgraded, then this is a no-op. Returns the
113 number of octets necessary to represent the string as UTF-8.
115 If your code needs to be compatible with versions of perl without
116 C<use feature 'unicode_strings';>, you can force Unicode semantics on
119 # force unicode semantics for $string without the
120 # "unicode_strings" feature
121 utf8::upgrade($string);
125 # without explicit or implicit use feature 'unicode_strings'
126 my $x = "\xDF"; # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
127 $x =~ /ss/i; # won't match
128 my $y = uc($x); # won't convert
130 $x =~ /ss/i; # matches
131 my $z = uc($x); # converts to "SS"
133 B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
134 use L<Encode> instead.
136 =item * C<$success = utf8::downgrade($string[, $fail_ok])>
139 Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from UTF-8 to the
140 equivalent octet sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC). The
141 logical character sequence itself is unchanged. If I<$string> is already
142 stored as native 8 bit, then this is a no-op. Can be used to make sure that
143 the UTF-8 flag is off, e.g. when you want to make sure that the substr() or
144 length() function works with the usually faster byte algorithm.
146 Fails if the original UTF-8 sequence cannot be represented in the
147 native 8 bit encoding. On failure dies or, if the value of I<$fail_ok> is
150 Returns true on success.
152 If your code expects an octet sequence this can be used to validate
153 that you've received one:
155 # throw an exception if not representable as octets
156 utf8::downgrade($string)
158 # or do your own error handling
159 utf8::downgrade($string, 1) or die "string must be octets";
161 B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
162 use L<Encode> instead.
164 =item * C<utf8::encode($string)>
167 Converts in-place the character sequence to the corresponding octet
168 sequence in Perl's extended UTF-8. That is, every (possibly wide) character
169 gets replaced with a sequence of one or more characters that represent the
170 individual UTF-8 bytes of the character. The UTF8 flag is turned off.
173 my $x = "\x{100}"; # $x contains one character, with ord 0x100
174 utf8::encode($x); # $x contains two characters, with ords (on
175 # ASCII platforms) 0xc4 and 0x80. On EBCDIC
176 # 1047, this would instead be 0x8C and 0x41.
181 $x = Encode::encode("utf8", $x);
183 B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
184 use L<Encode> instead.
186 =item * C<$success = utf8::decode($string)>
189 Attempts to convert in-place the octet sequence encoded in Perl's extended
190 UTF-8 to the corresponding character sequence. That is, it replaces each
191 sequence of characters in the string whose ords represent a valid (extended)
192 UTF-8 byte sequence, with the corresponding single character. The UTF-8 flag
193 is turned on only if the source string contains multiple-byte UTF-8
194 characters. If I<$string> is invalid as extended UTF-8, returns false;
195 otherwise returns true.
197 my $x = "\xc4\x80"; # $x contains two characters, with ords
199 utf8::decode($x); # On ASCII platforms, $x contains one char,
200 # with ord 0x100. Since these bytes aren't
201 # legal UTF-EBCDIC, on EBCDIC platforms, $x is
202 # unchanged and the function returns FALSE.
204 B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
205 use L<Encode> instead.
207 =item * C<$unicode = utf8::native_to_unicode($code_point)>
210 This takes an unsigned integer (which represents the ordinal number of a
211 character (or a code point) on the platform the program is being run on) and
212 returns its Unicode equivalent value. Since ASCII platforms natively use the
213 Unicode code points, this function returns its input on them. On EBCDIC
214 platforms it converts from EBCDIC to Unicode.
216 A meaningless value will currently be returned if the input is not an unsigned
219 Since Perl v5.22.0, calls to this function are optimized out on ASCII
220 platforms, so there is no performance hit in using it there.
222 =item * C<$native = utf8::unicode_to_native($code_point)>
225 This is the inverse of C<utf8::native_to_unicode()>, converting the other
226 direction. Again, on ASCII platforms, this returns its input, but on EBCDIC
227 platforms it will find the native platform code point, given any Unicode one.
229 A meaningless value will currently be returned if the input is not an unsigned
232 Since Perl v5.22.0, calls to this function are optimized out on ASCII
233 platforms, so there is no performance hit in using it there.
235 =item * C<$flag = utf8::is_utf8($string)>
237 (Since Perl 5.8.1) Test whether I<$string> is marked internally as encoded in
238 UTF-8. Functionally the same as C<Encode::is_utf8($string)>.
240 Typically only necessary for debugging and testing, if you need to
241 dump the internals of an SV, L<Devel::Peek's|Devel::Peek> Dump()
242 provides more detail in a compact form.
244 If you still think you need this outside of debugging, testing or
245 dealing with filenames, you should probably read L<perlunitut> and
246 L<perlunifaq/What is "the UTF8 flag"?>.
248 Don't use this flag as a marker to distinguish character and binary
249 data, that should be decided for each variable when you write your
252 To force unicode semantics in code portable to perl 5.8 and 5.10, call
253 C<utf8::upgrade($string)> unconditionally.
255 =item * C<$flag = utf8::valid($string)>
257 [INTERNAL] Test whether I<$string> is in a consistent state regarding
258 UTF-8. Will return true if it is well-formed Perl extended UTF-8 and has the
260 on B<or> if I<$string> is held as bytes (both these states are 'consistent').
261 Main reason for this routine is to allow Perl's test suite to check
262 that operations have left strings in a consistent state.
266 C<utf8::encode> is like C<utf8::upgrade>, but the UTF8 flag is
267 cleared. See L<perlunicode>, and the C API
268 functions C<L<sv_utf8_upgrade|perlapi/sv_utf8_upgrade>>,
269 C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_downgrade>>, C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_encode>>,
270 and C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_decode>>, which are wrapped by the Perl functions
271 C<utf8::upgrade>, C<utf8::downgrade>, C<utf8::encode> and
272 C<utf8::decode>. Also, the functions C<utf8::is_utf8>, C<utf8::valid>,
273 C<utf8::encode>, C<utf8::decode>, C<utf8::upgrade>, and C<utf8::downgrade> are
274 actually internal, and thus always available, without a C<require utf8>
279 Some filesystems may not support UTF-8 file names, or they may be supported
280 incompatibly with Perl. Therefore UTF-8 names that are visible to the
281 filesystem, such as module names may not work.
285 L<perlunitut>, L<perluniintro>, L<perlrun>, L<bytes>, L<perlunicode>