NAME

Unicode::Semantics - Work around *the* Perl 5 Unicode bug

SYNOPSIS

    $foo;     # could be anything
    up $foo;  # force Unicode semantics

or:

    up($foo) =~ s/\W/_/g;  # Upgrade and use immediately

DESCRIPTION

Although the internal encoding of a string is hidden from the Perl programmer, it does unfortunately affect semantics. Perl uses Unicode semantics when the internal encoding for a string is UTF8, but it uses ASCII semantics when the internal encoding is ISO-8859-1.

Because you shouldn't (and often don't) know what the internal encoding will be, it's hard to predict whether these operations will actually do what you want. Unicode::Semantics::us() gives you predictable results for your string.

Normally, the non-ASCII part of the character set is ignored when for the following operations on a string of which the internal encoding is ISO-8859-1:

    * uc, lc, ucfirst, lcfirst, \U, \L, \u, \l
    * \d, \s, \w, \D, \S, \W
    * /.../i, (?i:...)
    * /[[:posix:]]/

This module exports us that upgrades your string to UTF-8 internally and returns the string. An alias, up, is also exported by default. After initially releasing the module with us, I changed my mind and starting liking up better.

You can also use the built-in function utf8::upgrade, which upgrades the string and returns the number of octets used for the internal UTF8 buffer.

Non-string values (like numbers, references, objects, and undef) are stringified on upgrade.

us, up, and utf8::upgrade mutate the variable's actual value. If you need to upgrade only a copy of a string, make the copy first:

    up(my $copy = $original);

Upgrading an already upgraded variable does not re-upgrade, so it is safe.

WHY THIS MODULE

While using a module for something that is built-in may be silly, there's one good reason to use it anyway: "use Unicode::Semantics" is an implicit reference to this documentation, that explains the problem, whereas the reason for using utf8::upgrade may not be obvious.

This module is meant for production use.

Released minutes before the lightning talk "Working around *the* Unicode bug" during YAPC::Europe 2007, in Vienna. See http://juerd.nl/files/slides/2007yapceu/unicodesemantics.html for slides.

AUTHOR

Juerd Waalboer <#####@juerd.nl>

LICENSE

Pick your favourite OSI approved license :)

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical