$utf8::hint_bits = 0x00800000;
-our $VERSION = '1.16';
+our $VERSION = '1.22';
sub import {
$^H |= $utf8::hint_bits;
}
sub AUTOLOAD {
- require "utf8_heavy.pl";
goto &$AUTOLOAD if defined &$AUTOLOAD;
require Carp;
Carp::croak("Undefined subroutine $AUTOLOAD called");
$unicode = utf8::native_to_unicode(ord('A')); # returns 65 on both
# ASCII and EBCDIC
# platforms
- $native = utf8::unicode_to_native(65); # returns 65 on ASCII
- # platforms; 193 on EBCDIC
+ $native = utf8::unicode_to_native(65); # returns 65 on ASCII
+ # platforms; 193 on
+ # EBCDIC
$flag = utf8::is_utf8($string); # since Perl 5.8.1
$flag = utf8::valid($string);
=head1 DESCRIPTION
The C<use utf8> pragma tells the Perl parser to allow UTF-8 in the
-program text in the current lexical scope (allow UTF-EBCDIC on EBCDIC based
-platforms). The C<no utf8> pragma tells Perl to switch back to treating
-the source text as literal bytes in the current lexical scope.
+program text in the current lexical scope. The C<no utf8> pragma tells Perl
+to switch back to treating the source text as literal bytes in the current
+lexical scope. (On EBCDIC platforms, technically it is allowing UTF-EBCDIC,
+and not UTF-8, but this distinction is academic, so in this document the term
+UTF-8 is used to mean both).
B<Do not use this pragma for anything else than telling Perl that your
script is written in UTF-8.> The utility functions described below are
source code, or C<use utf8;>, to instruct perl.
When UTF-8 becomes the standard source format, this pragma will
-effectively become a no-op. For convenience in what follows the term
-I<UTF-X> is used to refer to UTF-8 on ASCII and ISO Latin based
-platforms and UTF-EBCDIC on EBCDIC based platforms.
+effectively become a no-op.
See also the effects of the C<-C> switch and its cousin, the
C<PERL_UNICODE> environment variable, in L<perlrun>.
=item *
-Bytes in the source text that have their high-bit set will be treated
-as being part of a literal UTF-X sequence. This includes most
+Bytes in the source text that are not in the ASCII character set will be
+treated as being part of a literal UTF-8 sequence. This includes most
literals such as identifier names, string constants, and constant
regular expression patterns.
-On EBCDIC platforms characters in the Latin 1 character set are
-treated as being part of a literal UTF-EBCDIC character.
-
=back
-Note that if you have bytes with the eighth bit on in your script
-(for example embedded Latin-1 in your string literals), C<use utf8>
-will be unhappy since the bytes are most probably not well-formed
-UTF-X. If you want to have such bytes under C<use utf8>, you can disable
-this pragma until the end the block (or file, if at top level) by
-C<no utf8;>.
+Note that if you have non-ASCII, non-UTF-8 bytes in your script (for example
+embedded Latin-1 in your string literals), C<use utf8> will be unhappy. If
+you want to have such bytes under C<use utf8>, you can disable this pragma
+until the end the block (or file, if at top level) by C<no utf8;>.
=head2 Utility functions
=item * C<$num_octets = utf8::upgrade($string)>
+(Since Perl v5.8.0)
Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from an octet
-sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC) to I<UTF-X>. The
+sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC) to UTF-8. The
logical character sequence itself is unchanged. If I<$string> is already
-stored as I<UTF-X>, then this is a no-op. Returns the
-number of octets necessary to represent the string as I<UTF-X>. Can be
-used to make sure that the UTF-8 flag is on, so that C<\w> or C<lc()>
-work as Unicode on strings containing characters in the range 0x80-0xFF
-(on ASCII and derivatives).
+upgraded, then this is a no-op. Returns the
+number of octets necessary to represent the string as UTF-8.
-B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings.>
-Therefore Encode is recommended for the general purposes; see also
-L<Encode>.
+If your code needs to be compatible with versions of perl without
+C<use feature 'unicode_strings';>, you can force Unicode semantics on
+a given string:
-=item * C<$success = utf8::downgrade($string[, $fail_ok])>
+ # force unicode semantics for $string without the
+ # "unicode_strings" feature
+ utf8::upgrade($string);
-Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from
-I<UTF-X> to the equivalent octet sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1
-or EBCDIC). The logical character sequence itself is unchanged. If
-I<$string> is already stored as native 8 bit, then this is a no-op. Can
-be used to
-make sure that the UTF-8 flag is off, e.g. when you want to make sure
-that the substr() or length() function works with the usually faster
-byte algorithm.
+For example:
-Fails if the original I<UTF-X> sequence cannot be represented in the
+ # without explicit or implicit use feature 'unicode_strings'
+ my $x = "\xDF"; # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
+ $x =~ /ss/i; # won't match
+ my $y = uc($x); # won't convert
+ utf8::upgrade($x);
+ $x =~ /ss/i; # matches
+ my $z = uc($x); # converts to "SS"
+
+B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
+use L<Encode> instead.
+
+=item * C<$success = utf8::downgrade($string[, $fail_ok])>
+
+(Since Perl v5.8.0)
+Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from UTF-8 to the
+equivalent octet sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC). The
+logical character sequence itself is unchanged. If I<$string> is already
+stored as native 8 bit, then this is a no-op. Can be used to make sure that
+the UTF-8 flag is off, e.g. when you want to make sure that the substr() or
+length() function works with the usually faster byte algorithm.
+
+Fails if the original UTF-8 sequence cannot be represented in the
native 8 bit encoding. On failure dies or, if the value of I<$fail_ok> is
true, returns false.
Returns true on success.
-B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings.>
-Therefore Encode is recommended for the general purposes; see also
-L<Encode>.
+If your code expects an octet sequence this can be used to validate
+that you've received one:
+
+ # throw an exception if not representable as octets
+ utf8::downgrade($string)
+
+ # or do your own error handling
+ utf8::downgrade($string, 1) or die "string must be octets";
+
+B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
+use L<Encode> instead.
=item * C<utf8::encode($string)>
+(Since Perl v5.8.0)
Converts in-place the character sequence to the corresponding octet
-sequence in I<UTF-X>. That is, every (possibly wide) character gets
-replaced with a sequence of one or more characters that represent the
-individual I<UTF-X> bytes of the character. The UTF8 flag is turned off.
+sequence in Perl's extended UTF-8. That is, every (possibly wide) character
+gets replaced with a sequence of one or more characters that represent the
+individual UTF-8 bytes of the character. The UTF8 flag is turned off.
Returns nothing.
- my $a = "\x{100}"; # $a contains one character, with ord 0x100
- utf8::encode($a); # $a contains two characters, with ords (on
- # ASCII platforms) 0xc4 and 0x80
+ my $x = "\x{100}"; # $x contains one character, with ord 0x100
+ utf8::encode($x); # $x contains two characters, with ords (on
+ # ASCII platforms) 0xc4 and 0x80. On EBCDIC
+ # 1047, this would instead be 0x8C and 0x41.
+
+Similar to:
+
+ use Encode;
+ $x = Encode::encode("utf8", $x);
-B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings.>
-Therefore Encode is recommended for the general purposes; see also
-L<Encode>.
+B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
+use L<Encode> instead.
=item * C<$success = utf8::decode($string)>
-Attempts to convert in-place the octet sequence encoded as I<UTF-X> to the
-corresponding character sequence. That is, it replaces each sequence of
-characters in the string whose ords represent a valid UTF-X byte
-sequence, with the corresponding single character. The UTF-8 flag is
-turned on only if the source string contains multiple-byte I<UTF-X>
-characters. If I<$string> is invalid as I<UTF-X>, returns false;
+(Since Perl v5.8.0)
+Attempts to convert in-place the octet sequence encoded in Perl's extended
+UTF-8 to the corresponding character sequence. That is, it replaces each
+sequence of characters in the string whose ords represent a valid (extended)
+UTF-8 byte sequence, with the corresponding single character. The UTF-8 flag
+is turned on only if the source string contains multiple-byte UTF-8
+characters. If I<$string> is invalid as extended UTF-8, returns false;
otherwise returns true.
- my $a = "\xc4\x80"; # $a contains two characters, with ords
+ my $x = "\xc4\x80"; # $x contains two characters, with ords
# 0xc4 and 0x80
- utf8::decode($a); # On ASCII platforms, $a contains one char,
- # with ord 0x100. On EBCDIC platforms, $a
- # is unchanged and the function returns FALSE.
-
-(C<"\xc4\x80"> is not a valid sequence of bytes in any UTF-8-encoded
-character(s) in the EBCDIC code pages that Perl supports, which is why the
-above example returns failure on them. What does decode into C<\x{100}>
-depends on the platform. It is C<"\x8C\x41"> in IBM-1047.)
+ utf8::decode($x); # On ASCII platforms, $x contains one char,
+ # with ord 0x100. Since these bytes aren't
+ # legal UTF-EBCDIC, on EBCDIC platforms, $x is
+ # unchanged and the function returns FALSE.
-B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings.>
-Therefore Encode is recommended for the general purposes; see also
-L<Encode>.
+B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
+use L<Encode> instead.
=item * C<$unicode = utf8::native_to_unicode($code_point)>
=item * C<$flag = utf8::is_utf8($string)>
(Since Perl 5.8.1) Test whether I<$string> is marked internally as encoded in
-UTF-8. Functionally the same as Encode::is_utf8().
+UTF-8. Functionally the same as C<Encode::is_utf8($string)>.
+
+Typically only necessary for debugging and testing, if you need to
+dump the internals of an SV, L<Devel::Peek's|Devel::Peek> Dump()
+provides more detail in a compact form.
+
+If you still think you need this outside of debugging, testing or
+dealing with filenames, you should probably read L<perlunitut> and
+L<perlunifaq/What is "the UTF8 flag"?>.
+
+Don't use this flag as a marker to distinguish character and binary
+data: that should be decided for each variable when you write your
+code.
+
+To force unicode semantics in code portable to perl 5.8 and 5.10, call
+C<utf8::upgrade($string)> unconditionally.
=item * C<$flag = utf8::valid($string)>
[INTERNAL] Test whether I<$string> is in a consistent state regarding
-UTF-8. Will return true if it is well-formed UTF-8 and has the UTF-8 flag
+UTF-8. Will return true if it is well-formed Perl extended UTF-8 and has the
+UTF-8 flag
on B<or> if I<$string> is held as bytes (both these states are 'consistent').
-Main reason for this routine is to allow Perl's test suite to check
-that operations have left strings in a consistent state. You most
-probably want to use utf8::is_utf8() instead.
+The main reason for this routine is to allow Perl's test suite to check
+that operations have left strings in a consistent state.
=back
C<utf8::encode> is like C<utf8::upgrade>, but the UTF8 flag is
-cleared. See L<perlunicode> for more on the UTF8 flag and the C API
-functions C<sv_utf8_upgrade>, C<sv_utf8_downgrade>, C<sv_utf8_encode>,
-and C<sv_utf8_decode>, which are wrapped by the Perl functions
+cleared. See L<perlunicode>, and the C API
+functions C<L<sv_utf8_upgrade|perlapi/sv_utf8_upgrade>>,
+C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_downgrade>>, C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_encode>>,
+and C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_decode>>, which are wrapped by the Perl functions
C<utf8::upgrade>, C<utf8::downgrade>, C<utf8::encode> and
-C<utf8::decode>. Also, the functions utf8::is_utf8, utf8::valid,
-utf8::encode, utf8::decode, utf8::upgrade, and utf8::downgrade are
+C<utf8::decode>. Also, the functions C<utf8::is_utf8>, C<utf8::valid>,
+C<utf8::encode>, C<utf8::decode>, C<utf8::upgrade>, and C<utf8::downgrade> are
actually internal, and thus always available, without a C<require utf8>
statement.
=head1 BUGS
-One can have Unicode in identifier names, but not in package/class or
-subroutine names. While some limited functionality towards this does
-exist as of Perl 5.8.0, that is more accidental than designed; use of
-Unicode for the said purposes is unsupported.
-
-One reason of this unfinishedness is its (currently) inherent
-unportability: since both package names and subroutine names may need
-to be mapped to file and directory names, the Unicode capability of
-the filesystem becomes important-- and there unfortunately aren't
-portable answers.
+Some filesystems may not support UTF-8 file names, or they may be supported
+incompatibly with Perl. Therefore UTF-8 names that are visible to the
+filesystem, such as module names may not work.
=head1 SEE ALSO