| encoding - allows you to write your script in non-ascii or non-utf8 |
encoding - allows you to write your script in non-ascii or non-utf8
use encoding "greek"; # Perl like Greek to you? use encoding "euc-jp"; # Jperl!
# or you can even do this if your shell supports your native encoding
perl -Mencoding=latin2 -e '...' # Feeling centrally European? perl -Mencoding=euc-kr -e '...' # Or Korean?
# more control
# A simple euc-cn => utf-8 converter
use encoding "euc-cn", STDOUT => "utf8"; while(<>){print};
# "no encoding;" supported (but not scoped!) no encoding;
# an alternate way, Filter use encoding "euc-jp", Filter=>1; # now you can use kanji identifiers -- in euc-jp!
Let's start with a bit of history: Perl 5.6.0 introduced Unicode
support. You could apply substr() and regexes even to complex CJK
characters -- so long as the script was written in UTF-8. But back
then, text editors that supported UTF-8 were still rare and many users
instead chose to write scripts in legacy encodings, giving up a whole
new feature of Perl 5.6.
Rewind to the future: starting from perl 5.8.0 with the encoding
pragma, you can write your script in any encoding you like (so long
as the Encode module supports it) and still enjoy Unicode support.
This pragma achieves that by doing the following:
q//,qq//,qr//,qw///, qx//) from
the encoding specified to utf8. In Perl 5.8.1 and later, literals in
tr/// and DATA pseudo-filehandle are also converted.
Changing PerlIO layers of STDIN and STDOUT to the encoding
specified.
You can write code in EUC-JP as follows:
my $Rakuda = "\xF1\xD1\xF1\xCC"; # Camel in Kanji
#<-char-><-char-> # 4 octets
s/\bCamel\b/$Rakuda/;
And with use encoding "euc-jp" in effect, it is the same thing as
the code in UTF-8:
my $Rakuda = "\x{99F1}\x{99DD}"; # two Unicode Characters
s/\bCamel\b/$Rakuda/;
STD(IN|OUT)The encoding pragma also modifies the filehandle layers of STDIN and STDOUT to the specified encoding. Therefore,
use encoding "euc-jp"; my $message = "Camel is the symbol of perl.\n"; my $Rakuda = "\xF1\xD1\xF1\xCC"; # Camel in Kanji $message =~ s/\bCamel\b/$Rakuda/; print $message;
Will print ``\xF1\xD1\xF1\xCC is the symbol of perl.\n'', not ``\x{99F1}\x{99DD} is the symbol of perl.\n''.
You can override this by giving extra arguments; see below.
Some of the features offered by this pragma requires perl 5.8.1. Most of these are done by Inaba Hiroto. Any other features and changes are good for 5.8.0.
tr// was overlooked by Perl 5 porters when they released perl 5.8.0
See the section below for details.
DATA.
Note that STDERR WILL NOT be changed.
Also note that non-STD file handles remain unaffected. Use use
open or binmode to change layers of those.
If no encoding is specified, the environment variable PERL_ENCODING
is consulted. If no encoding can be found, the error Unknown encoding
'I<ENCNAME>' will be thrown.
STDIN => ENCNAME form. In this case, you cannot omit the
first ENCNAME. STDIN => undef turns the IO transcoding
completely off.
When ${^UNICODE} exists and non-zero, these options will completely ignored. ${^UNICODE} is a variable introduced in perl 5.8.1. See the perlrun manpage see ${^UNICODE} in the perlvar manpage and -C in the perlrun manpage for details (perl 5.8.1 and later).
qq() and
qr()), this will apply a source filter to the entire source code. See
The Filter Option below for details.
The magic of use encoding is not applied to the names of
identifiers. In order to make ${"\x{4eba}"}++ ($human++, where human
is a single Han ideograph) work, you still need to write your script
in UTF-8 -- or use a source filter. That's what 'Filter=>1' does.
What does this mean? Your source code behaves as if it is written in
UTF-8 with 'use utf8' in effect. So even if your editor only supports
Shift_JIS, for example, you can still try examples in Chapter 15 of
Programming Perl, 3rd Ed.. For instance, you can use UTF-8
identifiers.
This option is significantly slower and (as of this writing) non-ASCII identifiers are not very stable WITHOUT this option and with the source code written in UTF-8.
STDIN=>ENCODING and STDOUT=>ENCODING work like
non-filter version.
use utf8 is implicitly declared so you no longer have to use
utf8 to ${"\x{4eba}"}++.
The pragma is a per script, not a per block lexical. Only the last
use encoding or no encoding matters, and it affects
the whole script. However, the <no encoding> pragma is supported and
use encoding can appear as many times as you want in a given script.
The multiple use of this pragma is discouraged.
By the same reason, the use this pragma inside modules is also discouraged (though not as strongly discouranged as the case above. See below).
If you still have to write a module with this pragma, be very careful of the load order. See the codes below;
# called module package Module_IN_BAR; use encoding "bar"; # stuff in "bar" encoding here 1;
# caller script use encoding "foo" use Module_IN_BAR; # surprise! use encoding "bar" is in effect.
The best way to avoid this oddity is to use this pragma RIGHT AFTER other modules are loaded. i.e.
use Module_IN_BAR; use encoding "foo";
Notice that only literals (string or regular expression) having only legacy code points are affected: if you mix data like this
\xDF\x{100}
the data is assumed to be in (Latin 1 and) Unicode, not in your native encoding. In other words, this will match in ``greek'':
"\xDF" =~ /\x{3af}/
but this will not
"\xDF\x{100}" =~ /\x{3af}\x{100}/
since the \xDF (ISO 8859-7 GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH TONOS) on
the left will not be upgraded to \x{3af} (Unicode GREEK SMALL
LETTER IOTA WITH TONOS) because of the \x{100} on the left. You
should not be mixing your legacy data and Unicode in the same string.
This pragma also affects encoding of the 0x80..0xFF code point range:
normally characters in that range are left as eight-bit bytes (unless
they are combined with characters with code points 0x100 or larger,
in which case all characters need to become UTF-8 encoded), but if
the encoding pragma is present, even the 0x80..0xFF range always
gets UTF-8 encoded.
After all, the best thing about this pragma is that you don't have to resort to \x{....} just to spell your name in a native encoding. So feel free to put your strings in your encoding in quotes and regexes.
The encoding pragma works by decoding string literals in
q//,qq//,qr//,qw///, qx// and so forth. In perl 5.8.0, this
does not apply to tr///. Therefore,
use encoding 'euc-jp'; #.... $kana =~ tr/\xA4\xA1-\xA4\xF3/\xA5\xA1-\xA5\xF3/; # -------- -------- -------- --------
Does not work as
$kana =~ tr/\x{3041}-\x{3093}/\x{30a1}-\x{30f3}/;
utf8 euc-jp charnames::viacode()
-----------------------------------------
\x{3041} \xA4\xA1 HIRAGANA LETTER SMALL A
\x{3093} \xA4\xF3 HIRAGANA LETTER N
\x{30a1} \xA5\xA1 KATAKANA LETTER SMALL A
\x{30f3} \xA5\xF3 KATAKANA LETTER N
This counterintuitive behavior has been fixed in perl 5.8.1.
In perl 5.8.0, you can work aroud as follows;
use encoding 'euc-jp';
# ....
eval qq{ \$kana =~ tr/\xA4\xA1-\xA4\xF3/\xA5\xA1-\xA5\xF3/ };
Note the tr// expression is surronded by qq{}. The idea behind
is the same as classic idiom that makes tr/// 'interpolate'.
tr/$from/$to/; # wrong!
eval qq{ tr/$from/$to/ }; # workaround.
Nevertheless, in case of encoding pragma even q// is affected so
tr/// not being decoded was obviously against the will of Perl5
Porters so it has been fixed in Perl 5.8.1 or later.
use encoding "iso 8859-7";
# \xDF in ISO 8859-7 (Greek) is \x{3af} in Unicode.
$a = "\xDF";
$b = "\x{100}";
printf "%#x\n", ord($a); # will print 0x3af, not 0xdf
$c = $a . $b;
# $c will be "\x{3af}\x{100}", not "\x{df}\x{100}".
# chr() is affected, and ...
print "mega\n" if ord(chr(0xdf)) == 0x3af;
# ... ord() is affected by the encoding pragma ...
print "tera\n" if ord(pack("C", 0xdf)) == 0x3af;
# ... as are eq and cmp ...
print "peta\n" if "\x{3af}" eq pack("C", 0xdf);
print "exa\n" if "\x{3af}" cmp pack("C", 0xdf) == 0;
# ... but pack/unpack C are not affected, in case you still
# want to go back to your native encoding
print "zetta\n" if unpack("C", (pack("C", 0xdf))) == 0xdf;
# Save this one in utf8 # replace *non-ascii* with a non-ascii string my $camel; format STDOUT = *non-ascii*@>>>>>>> $camel . $camel = "*non-ascii*"; binmode(STDOUT=>':encoding(utf8)'); # bang! write; # funny print $camel, "\n"; # fine
Without binmode this happens to work but without binmode, print()
fails instead of write().
At any rate, the very use of format is questionable when it comes to unicode characters since you have to consider such things as character width (i.e. double-width for ideographs) and directions (i.e. BIDI for Arabic and Hebrew).
This pragma first appeared in Perl 5.8.0. For features that require 5.8.1 and better, see above.
the perlunicode manpage, the Encode manpage, the open manpage, the Filter::Util::Call manpage,
Ch. 15 of Programming Perl (3rd Edition)
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant;
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN 0-596-00027-8
| encoding - allows you to write your script in non-ascii or non-utf8 |