The London Perl and Raku Workshop takes place on 26th Oct 2024. If your company depends on Perl, please consider sponsoring and/or attending.

NAME

Unicode::Util - Unicode-aware versions of built-in Perl functions

VERSION

This document describes Unicode::Util version 0.03.

SYNOPSIS

    use Unicode::Util qw( graph_length code_length byte_length );

    # grapheme cluster ю́: Cyrillic small letter yu + combining acute accent
    my $grapheme = "\x{44E}\x{301}";

    say graph_length($grapheme);  # 1
    say code_length($grapheme);   # 2
    say byte_length($grapheme);   # 4

DESCRIPTION

This module provides additional versions of Perl’s built-in functions, tailored to work on three different units:

  • graph: Unicode extended grapheme clusters (graphemes)

  • code: Unicode codepoints

  • byte: 8-bit bytes (octets)

This is an early release and this module is likely to have major revisions. Only the length-, chop-, and reverse-functions are currently implemented. See the "TODO" section for planned future additions.

FUNCTIONS

length

graph_length($string)

Returns the length in graphemes of the given string. This is likely the number of “characters” that many people would count on a printed string, plus non-printing characters.

code_length($string)

Returns the length in codepoints of the given string. This is likely the number of “characters” that many programmers and programming languages would count in a string.

byte_length($string)

Returns the length in bytes of the given string encoded as UTF-8. This is the number of bytes that many computers would count when storing a string.

chop

These do not modify the original value, unlike the built-in chop.

graph_chop($string)

Returns the given string with the last grapheme chopped off.

code_chop($string)

Returns the given string with the last codepoint chopped off.

reverse

graph_reverse($string)

Returns the given string value with all graphemes in the opposite order.

TODO

Evaluate the following core Perl functions and operators for the potential addition to this module.

split, substr, index, rindex, eq, ne, lt, gt, le, ge, cmp

AUTHOR

Nick Patch <patch@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

© 2011–2012 Nick Patch

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.