perlunicode

PERLUNICODE(1)         Perl Programmers Reference Guide         PERLUNICODE(1)

NAME
       perlunicode - Unicode support in Perl

DESCRIPTION
       If you haven't already, before reading this document, you should become
       familiar with both perlunitut and perluniintro.

       Unicode aims to UNI-fy the en-CODE-ings of all the world's character
       sets into a single Standard.   For quite a few of the various coding
       standards that existed when Unicode was first created, converting from
       each to Unicode essentially meant adding a constant to each code point
       in the original standard, and converting back meant just subtracting
       that same constant.  For ASCII and ISO-8859-1, the constant is 0.  For
       ISO-8859-5, (Cyrillic) the constant is 864; for Hebrew (ISO-8859-8),
       it's 1488; Thai (ISO-8859-11), 3424; and so forth.  This made it easy
       to do the conversions, and facilitated the adoption of Unicode.

       And it worked; nowadays, those legacy standards are rarely used.  Most
       everyone uses Unicode.

       Unicode is a comprehensive standard.  It specifies many things outside
       the scope of Perl, such as how to display sequences of characters.  For
       a full discussion of all aspects of Unicode, see
       <http://www.unicode.org>.

   Important Caveats
       Even though some of this section may not be understandable to you on
       first reading, we think it's important enough to highlight some of the
       gotchas before delving further, so here goes:

       Unicode support is an extensive requirement. While Perl does not
       implement the Unicode standard or the accompanying technical reports
       from cover to cover, Perl does support many Unicode features.

       Also, the use of Unicode may present security issues that aren't
       obvious, see "Security Implications of Unicode" below.

       Safest if you "use feature 'unicode_strings'"
           In order to preserve backward compatibility, Perl does not turn on
           full internal Unicode support unless the pragma
           "usefeature'unicode_strings'" is specified.  (This is automatically
           selected if you "use5.012" or higher.)  Failure to do this can
           trigger unexpected surprises.  See "The "Unicode Bug"" below.

           This pragma doesn't affect I/O.  Nor does it change the internal
           representation of strings, only their interpretation.  There are
           still several places where Unicode isn't fully supported, such as
           in filenames.

       Input and Output Layers
           Use the ":encoding(...)" layer  to read from and write to
           filehandles using the specified encoding.  (See open.)

       You must convert your non-ASCII, non-UTF-8 Perl scripts to be UTF-8.
           The encoding module has been deprecated since perl 5.18 and the
           perl internals it requires have been removed with perl 5.26.

       "use utf8" still needed to enable UTF-8 in scripts
           If your Perl script is itself encoded in UTF-8, the "useutf8"
           pragma must be explicitly included to enable recognition of that
           (in string or regular expression literals, or in identifier names).
           This is the only time when an explicit "useutf8" is needed.  (See
           utf8).

           If a Perl script begins with the bytes that form the UTF-8 encoding
           of the Unicode BYTE ORDER MARK ("BOM", see "Unicode Encodings"),
           those bytes are completely ignored.

       UTF-16 scripts autodetected
           If a Perl script begins with the Unicode "BOM" (UTF-16LE,
           UTF16-BE), or if the script looks like non-"BOM"-marked UTF-16 of
           either endianness, Perl will correctly read in the script as the
           appropriate Unicode encoding.

   Byte and Character Semantics
       Before Unicode, most encodings used 8 bits (a single byte) to encode
       each character.  Thus a character was a byte, and a byte was a
       character, and there could be only 256 or fewer possible characters.
       "Byte Semantics" in the title of this section refers to this behavior.
       There was no need to distinguish between "Byte" and "Character".

       Then along comes Unicode which has room for over a million characters
       (and Perl allows for even more).  This means that a character may
       require more than a single byte to represent it, and so the two terms
       are no longer equivalent.  What matter are the characters as whole
       entities, and not usually the bytes that comprise them.  That's what
       the term "Character Semantics" in the title of this section refers to.

       Perl had to change internally to decouple "bytes" from "characters".
       It is important that you too change your ideas, if you haven't already,
       so that "byte" and "character" no longer mean the same thing in your
       mind.

       The basic building block of Perl strings has always been a "character".
       The changes basically come down to that the implementation no longer
       thinks that a character is always just a single byte.

       There are various things to note:

       o   String handling functions, for the most part, continue to operate
           in terms of characters.  "length()", for example, returns the
           number of characters in a string, just as before.  But that number
           no longer is necessarily the same as the number of bytes in the
           string (there may be more bytes than characters).  The other such
           functions include "chop()", "chomp()", "substr()", "pos()",
           "index()", "rindex()", "sort()", "sprintf()", and "write()".

           The exceptions are:

           o   the bit-oriented "vec"

           o   the byte-oriented "pack"/"unpack" "C" format

               However, the "W" specifier does operate on whole characters, as
               does the "U" specifier.

           o   some operators that interact with the platform's operating
               system

               Operators dealing with filenames are examples.

           o   when the functions are called from within the scope of the
               "usebytes" pragma

               Likely, you should use this only for debugging anyway.

       o   Strings--including hash keys--and regular expression patterns may
           contain characters that have ordinal values larger than 255.

           If you use a Unicode editor to edit your program, Unicode
           characters may occur directly within the literal strings in UTF-8
           encoding, or UTF-16.  (The former requires a "use utf8", the latter
           may require a "BOM".)

           "Creating Unicode" in perluniintro gives other ways to place non-
           ASCII characters in your strings.

       o   The "chr()" and "ord()" functions work on whole characters.

       o   Regular expressions match whole characters.  For example, "."
           matches a whole character instead of only a single byte.

       o   The "tr///" operator translates whole characters.  (Note that the
           "tr///CU" functionality has been removed.  For similar
           functionality to that, see "pack('U0', ...)" and "pack('C0',
           ...)").

       o   "scalar reverse()" reverses by character rather than by byte.

       o   The bit string operators, "& | ^ ~" and (starting in v5.22) "&. |.
           ^.  ~." can operate on bit strings encoded in UTF-8, but this can
           give unexpected results if any of the strings contain code points
           above 0xFF.  Starting in v5.28, it is a fatal error to have such an
           operand.  Otherwise, the operation is performed on a non-UTF-8 copy
           of the operand.  If you're not sure about the encoding of a string,
           downgrade it before using any of these operators; you can use
           "utf8::utf8_downgrade()".

       The bottom line is that Perl has always practiced "Character
       Semantics", but with the advent of Unicode, that is now different than
       "Byte Semantics".

   ASCII Rules versus Unicode Rules
       Before Unicode, when a character was a byte was a character, Perl knew
       only about the 128 characters defined by ASCII, code points 0 through
       127 (except for under "uselocale").  That left the code points 128 to
       255 as unassigned, and available for whatever use a program might want.
       The only semantics they have is their ordinal numbers, and that they
       are members of none of the non-negative character classes.  None are
       considered to match "\w" for example, but all match "\W".

       Unicode, of course, assigns each of those code points a particular
       meaning (along with ones above 255).  To preserve backward
       compatibility, Perl only uses the Unicode meanings when there is some
       indication that Unicode is what is intended; otherwise the non-ASCII
       code points remain treated as if they are unassigned.

       Here are the ways that Perl knows that a string should be treated as
       Unicode:

       o   Within the scope of "useutf8"

           If the whole program is Unicode (signified by using 8-bit Unicode
           Transformation Format), then all literal strings within it must be
           Unicode.

       o   Within the scope of "usefeature'unicode_strings'"

           This pragma was created so you can explicitly tell Perl that
           operations executed within its scope are to use Unicode rules.
           More operations are affected with newer perls.  See "The "Unicode
           Bug"".

       o   Within the scope of "use5.012" or higher

           This implicitly turns on "usefeature'unicode_strings'".

       o   Within the scope of "uselocale'not_characters'", or "uselocale" and
           the current locale is a UTF-8 locale.

           The former is defined to imply Unicode handling; and the latter
           indicates a Unicode locale, hence a Unicode interpretation of all
           strings within it.

       o   When the string contains a Unicode-only code point

           Perl has never accepted code points above 255 without them being
           Unicode, so their use implies Unicode for the whole string.

       o   When the string contains a Unicode named code point "\N{...}"

           The "\N{...}" construct explicitly refers to a Unicode code point,
           even if it is one that is also in ASCII.  Therefore the string
           containing it must be Unicode.

       o   When the string has come from an external source marked as Unicode

           The "-C" command line option can specify that certain inputs to the
           program are Unicode, and the values of this can be read by your
           Perl code, see "${^UNICODE}" in perlvar.

       o   When the string has been upgraded to UTF-8

           The function "utf8::utf8_upgrade()" can be explicitly used to
           permanently (unless a subsequent "utf8::utf8_downgrade()" is
           called) cause a string to be treated as Unicode.

       o   There are additional methods for regular expression patterns

           A pattern that is compiled with the "/u" or "/a" modifiers is
           treated as Unicode (though there are some restrictions with "/a").
           Under the "/d" and "/l" modifiers, there are several other
           indications for Unicode; see "Character set modifiers" in perlre.

       Note that all of the above are overridden within the scope of "use
       bytes"; but you should be using this pragma only for debugging.

       Note also that some interactions with the platform's operating system
       never use Unicode rules.

       When Unicode rules are in effect:

       o   Case translation operators use the Unicode case translation tables.

           Note that "uc()", or "\U" in interpolated strings, translates to
           uppercase, while "ucfirst", or "\u" in interpolated strings,
           translates to titlecase in languages that make the distinction
           (which is equivalent to uppercase in languages without the
           distinction).

           There is a CPAN module, "Unicode::Casing", which allows you to
           define your own mappings to be used in "lc()", "lcfirst()", "uc()",
           "ucfirst()", and "fc" (or their double-quoted string inlined
           versions such as "\U").  (Prior to Perl 5.16, this functionality
           was partially provided in the Perl core, but suffered from a number
           of insurmountable drawbacks, so the CPAN module was written
           instead.)

       o   Character classes in regular expressions match based on the
           character properties specified in the Unicode properties database.

           "\w" can be used to match a Japanese ideograph, for instance; and
           "[[:digit:]]" a Bengali number.

       o   Named Unicode properties, scripts, and block ranges may be used
           (like bracketed character classes) by using the "\p{}" "matches
           property" construct and the "\P{}" negation, "doesn't match
           property".

           See "Unicode Character Properties" for more details.

           You can define your own character properties and use them in the
           regular expression with the "\p{}" or "\P{}" construct.  See "User-
           Defined Character Properties" for more details.

   Extended Grapheme Clusters (Logical characters)
       Consider a character, say "H".  It could appear with various marks
       around it, such as an acute accent, or a circumflex, or various hooks,
       circles, arrows, etc., above, below, to one side or the other, etc.
       There are many possibilities among the world's languages.  The number
       of combinations is astronomical, and if there were a character for each
       combination, it would soon exhaust Unicode's more than a million
       possible characters.  So Unicode took a different approach: there is a
       character for the base "H", and a character for each of the possible
       marks, and these can be variously combined to get a final logical
       character.  So a logical character--what appears to be a single
       character--can be a sequence of more than one individual characters.
       The Unicode standard calls these "extended grapheme clusters" (which is
       an improved version of the no-longer much used "grapheme cluster");
       Perl furnishes the "\X" regular expression construct to match such
       sequences in their entirety.

       But Unicode's intent is to unify the existing character set standards
       and practices, and several pre-existing standards have single
       characters that mean the same thing as some of these combinations, like
       ISO-8859-1, which has quite a few of them. For example, "LATIN CAPITAL
       LETTER E WITH ACUTE" was already in this standard when Unicode came
       along.  Unicode therefore added it to its repertoire as that single
       character.  But this character is considered by Unicode to be
       equivalent to the sequence consisting of the character "LATIN CAPITAL
       LETTER E" followed by the character "COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT".

       "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE" is called a "pre-composed"
       character, and its equivalence with the "E" and the "COMBINING ACCENT"
       sequence is called canonical equivalence.  All pre-composed characters
       are said to have a decomposition (into the equivalent sequence), and
       the decomposition type is also called canonical.  A string may be
       comprised as much as possible of precomposed characters, or it may be
       comprised of entirely decomposed characters.  Unicode calls these
       respectively, "Normalization Form Composed" (NFC) and "Normalization
       Form Decomposed".  The "Unicode::Normalize" module contains functions
       that convert between the two.  A string may also have both composed
       characters and decomposed characters; this module can be used to make
       it all one or the other.

       You may be presented with strings in any of these equivalent forms.
       There is currently nothing in Perl 5 that ignores the differences.  So
       you'll have to specially handle it.  The usual advice is to convert
       your inputs to "NFD" before processing further.

       For more detailed information, see <http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/>.

   Unicode Character Properties
       (The only time that Perl considers a sequence of individual code points
       as a single logical character is in the "\X" construct, already
       mentioned above.   Therefore "character" in this discussion means a
       single Unicode code point.)

       Very nearly all Unicode character properties are accessible through
       regular expressions by using the "\p{}" "matches property" construct
       and the "\P{}" "doesn't match property" for its negation.

       For instance, "\p{Uppercase}" matches any single character with the
       Unicode "Uppercase" property, while "\p{L}" matches any character with
       a "General_Category" of "L" (letter) property (see "General_Category"
       below).  Brackets are not required for single letter property names, so
       "\p{L}" is equivalent to "\pL".

       More formally, "\p{Uppercase}" matches any single character whose
       Unicode "Uppercase" property value is "True", and "\P{Uppercase}"
       matches any character whose "Uppercase" property value is "False", and
       they could have been written as "\p{Uppercase=True}" and
       "\p{Uppercase=False}", respectively.

       This formality is needed when properties are not binary; that is, if
       they can take on more values than just "True" and "False".  For
       example, the "Bidi_Class" property (see "Bidirectional Character Types"
       below), can take on several different values, such as "Left", "Right",
       "Whitespace", and others.  To match these, one needs to specify both
       the property name ("Bidi_Class"), AND the value being matched against
       ("Left", "Right", etc.).  This is done, as in the examples above, by
       having the two components separated by an equal sign (or
       interchangeably, a colon), like "\p{Bidi_Class: Left}".

       All Unicode-defined character properties may be written in these
       compound forms of "\p{property=value}" or "\p{property:value}", but
       Perl provides some additional properties that are written only in the
       single form, as well as single-form short-cuts for all binary
       properties and certain others described below, in which you may omit
       the property name and the equals or colon separator.

       Most Unicode character properties have at least two synonyms (or
       aliases if you prefer): a short one that is easier to type and a longer
       one that is more descriptive and hence easier to understand.  Thus the
       "L" and "Letter" properties above are equivalent and can be used
       interchangeably.  Likewise, "Upper" is a synonym for "Uppercase", and
       we could have written "\p{Uppercase}" equivalently as "\p{Upper}".
       Also, there are typically various synonyms for the values the property
       can be.   For binary properties, "True" has 3 synonyms: "T", "Yes", and
       "Y"; and "False" has correspondingly "F", "No", and "N".  But be
       careful.  A short form of a value for one property may not mean the
       same thing as the same short form for another.  Thus, for the
       "General_Category" property, "L" means "Letter", but for the
       "Bidi_Class" property, "L" means "Left".  A complete list of properties
       and synonyms is in perluniprops.

       Upper/lower case differences in property names and values are
       irrelevant; thus "\p{Upper}" means the same thing as "\p{upper}" or
       even "\p{UpPeR}".  Similarly, you can add or subtract underscores
       anywhere in the middle of a word, so that these are also equivalent to
       "\p{U_p_p_e_r}".  And white space is irrelevant adjacent to non-word
       characters, such as the braces and the equals or colon separators, so
       "\p{   Upper  }" and "\p{ Upper_case : Y }" are equivalent to these as
       well.  In fact, white space and even hyphens can usually be added or
       deleted anywhere.  So even "\p{ Up-per case = Yes}" is equivalent.  All
       this is called "loose-matching" by Unicode.  The few places where
       stricter matching is used is in the middle of numbers, and in the Perl
       extension properties that begin or end with an underscore.  Stricter
       matching cares about white space (except adjacent to non-word
       characters), hyphens, and non-interior underscores.

       You can also use negation in both "\p{}" and "\P{}" by introducing a
       caret ("^") between the first brace and the property name: "\p{^Tamil}"
       is equal to "\P{Tamil}".

       Almost all properties are immune to case-insensitive matching.  That
       is, adding a "/i" regular expression modifier does not change what they
       match.  There are two sets that are affected.  The first set is
       "Uppercase_Letter", "Lowercase_Letter", and "Titlecase_Letter", all of
       which match "Cased_Letter" under "/i" matching.  And the second set is
       "Uppercase", "Lowercase", and "Titlecase", all of which match "Cased"
       under "/i" matching.  This set also includes its subsets "PosixUpper"
       and "PosixLower" both of which under "/i" match "PosixAlpha".  (The
       difference between these sets is that some things, such as Roman
       numerals, come in both upper and lower case so they are "Cased", but
       aren't considered letters, so they aren't "Cased_Letter"'s.)

       See "Beyond Unicode code points" for special considerations when
       matching Unicode properties against non-Unicode code points.

       General_Category

       Every Unicode character is assigned a general category, which is the
       "most usual categorization of a character" (from
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>).

       The compound way of writing these is like "\p{General_Category=Number}"
       (short: "\p{gc:n}").  But Perl furnishes shortcuts in which everything
       up through the equal or colon separator is omitted.  So you can instead
       just write "\pN".

       Here are the short and long forms of the values the "General Category"
       property can have:

           Short       Long

           L           Letter
           LC, L&      Cased_Letter (that is: [\p{Ll}\p{Lu}\p{Lt}])
           Lu          Uppercase_Letter
           Ll          Lowercase_Letter
           Lt          Titlecase_Letter
           Lm          Modifier_Letter
           Lo          Other_Letter

           M           Mark
           Mn          Nonspacing_Mark
           Mc          Spacing_Mark
           Me          Enclosing_Mark

           N           Number
           Nd          Decimal_Number (also Digit)
           Nl          Letter_Number
           No          Other_Number

           P           Punctuation (also Punct)
           Pc          Connector_Punctuation
           Pd          Dash_Punctuation
           Ps          Open_Punctuation
           Pe          Close_Punctuation
           Pi          Initial_Punctuation
                       (may behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage)
           Pf          Final_Punctuation
                       (may behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage)
           Po          Other_Punctuation

           S           Symbol
           Sm          Math_Symbol
           Sc          Currency_Symbol
           Sk          Modifier_Symbol
           So          Other_Symbol

           Z           Separator
           Zs          Space_Separator
           Zl          Line_Separator
           Zp          Paragraph_Separator

           C           Other
           Cc          Control (also Cntrl)
           Cf          Format
           Cs          Surrogate
           Co          Private_Use
           Cn          Unassigned

       Single-letter properties match all characters in any of the two-letter
       sub-properties starting with the same letter.  "LC" and "L&" are
       special: both are aliases for the set consisting of everything matched
       by "Ll", "Lu", and "Lt".

       Bidirectional Character Types

       Because scripts differ in their directionality (Hebrew and Arabic are
       written right to left, for example) Unicode supplies a "Bidi_Class"
       property.  Some of the values this property can have are:

           Value       Meaning

           L           Left-to-Right
           LRE         Left-to-Right Embedding
           LRO         Left-to-Right Override
           R           Right-to-Left
           AL          Arabic Letter
           RLE         Right-to-Left Embedding
           RLO         Right-to-Left Override
           PDF         Pop Directional Format
           EN          European Number
           ES          European Separator
           ET          European Terminator
           AN          Arabic Number
           CS          Common Separator
           NSM         Non-Spacing Mark
           BN          Boundary Neutral
           B           Paragraph Separator
           S           Segment Separator
           WS          Whitespace
           ON          Other Neutrals

       This property is always written in the compound form.  For example,
       "\p{Bidi_Class:R}" matches characters that are normally written right
       to left.  Unlike the "General_Category" property, this property can
       have more values added in a future Unicode release.  Those listed above
       comprised the complete set for many Unicode releases, but others were
       added in Unicode 6.3; you can always find what the current ones are in
       perluniprops.  And <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/> describes how
       to use them.

       Scripts

       The world's languages are written in many different scripts.  This
       sentence (unless you're reading it in translation) is written in Latin,
       while Russian is written in Cyrillic, and Greek is written in, well,
       Greek; Japanese mainly in Hiragana or Katakana.  There are many more.

       The Unicode "Script" and "Script_Extensions" properties give what
       script a given character is in.  The "Script_Extensions" property is an
       improved version of "Script", as demonstrated below.  Either property
       can be specified with the compound form like "\p{Script=Hebrew}"
       (short: "\p{sc=hebr}"), or "\p{Script_Extensions=Javanese}" (short:
       "\p{scx=java}").  In addition, Perl furnishes shortcuts for all
       "Script_Extensions" property names.  You can omit everything up through
       the equals (or colon), and simply write "\p{Latin}" or "\P{Cyrillic}".
       (This is not true for "Script", which is required to be written in the
       compound form.  Prior to Perl v5.26, the single form returned the plain
       old "Script" version, but was changed because "Script_Extensions" gives
       better results.)

       The difference between these two properties involves characters that
       are used in multiple scripts.  For example the digits '0' through '9'
       are used in many parts of the world.  These are placed in a script
       named "Common".  Other characters are used in just a few scripts.  For
       example, the "KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN" is used in both Japanese
       scripts, Katakana and Hiragana, but nowhere else.  The "Script"
       property places all characters that are used in multiple scripts in the
       "Common" script, while the "Script_Extensions" property places those
       that are used in only a few scripts into each of those scripts; while
       still using "Common" for those used in many scripts.  Thus both these
       match:

        "0" =~ /\p{sc=Common}/     # Matches
        "0" =~ /\p{scx=Common}/    # Matches

       and only the first of these match:

        "\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{sc=Common}  # Matches
        "\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{scx=Common} # No match

       And only the last two of these match:

        "\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{sc=Hiragana}  # No match
        "\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{sc=Katakana}  # No match
        "\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{scx=Hiragana} # Matches
        "\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{scx=Katakana} # Matches

       "Script_Extensions" is thus an improved "Script", in which there are
       fewer characters in the "Common" script, and correspondingly more in
       other scripts.  It is new in Unicode version 6.0, and its data are
       likely to change significantly in later releases, as things get sorted
       out.  New code should probably be using "Script_Extensions" and not
       plain "Script".  If you compile perl with a Unicode release that
       doesn't have "Script_Extensions", the single form Perl extensions will
       instead refer to the plain "Script" property.  If you compile with a
       version of Unicode that doesn't have the "Script" property, these
       extensions will not be defined at all.

       (Actually, besides "Common", the "Inherited" script, contains
       characters that are used in multiple scripts.  These are modifier
       characters which inherit the script value of the controlling character.
       Some of these are used in many scripts, and so go into "Inherited" in
       both "Script" and "Script_Extensions".  Others are used in just a few
       scripts, so are in "Inherited" in "Script", but not in
       "Script_Extensions".)

       It is worth stressing that there are several different sets of digits
       in Unicode that are equivalent to 0-9 and are matchable by "\d" in a
       regular expression.  If they are used in a single language only, they
       are in that language's "Script" and "Script_Extensions".  If they are
       used in more than one script, they will be in "sc=Common", but only if
       they are used in many scripts should they be in "scx=Common".

       The explanation above has omitted some detail; refer to UAX#24 "Unicode
       Script Property": <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24>.

       A complete list of scripts and their shortcuts is in perluniprops.

       Use of the "Is" Prefix

       For backward compatibility (with ancient Perl 5.6), all properties
       writable without using the compound form mentioned so far may have "Is"
       or "Is_" prepended to their name, so "\P{Is_Lu}", for example, is equal
       to "\P{Lu}", and "\p{IsScript:Arabic}" is equal to "\p{Arabic}".

       Blocks

       In addition to scripts, Unicode also defines blocks of characters.  The
       difference between scripts and blocks is that the concept of scripts is
       closer to natural languages, while the concept of blocks is more of an
       artificial grouping based on groups of Unicode characters with
       consecutive ordinal values. For example, the "Basic Latin" block is all
       the characters whose ordinals are between 0 and 127, inclusive; in
       other words, the ASCII characters.  The "Latin" script contains some
       letters from this as well as several other blocks, like "Latin-1
       Supplement", "Latin Extended-A", etc., but it does not contain all the
       characters from those blocks. It does not, for example, contain the
       digits 0-9, because those digits are shared across many scripts, and
       hence are in the "Common" script.

       For more about scripts versus blocks, see UAX#24 "Unicode Script
       Property": <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24>

       The "Script_Extensions" or "Script" properties are likely to be the
       ones you want to use when processing natural language; the "Block"
       property may occasionally be useful in working with the nuts and bolts
       of Unicode.

       Block names are matched in the compound form, like "\p{Block: Arrows}"
       or "\p{Blk=Hebrew}".  Unlike most other properties, only a few block
       names have a Unicode-defined short name.

       Perl also defines single form synonyms for the block property in cases
       where these do not conflict with something else.  But don't use any of
       these, because they are unstable.  Since these are Perl extensions,
       they are subordinate to official Unicode property names; Unicode
       doesn't know nor care about Perl's extensions.  It may happen that a
       name that currently means the Perl extension will later be changed
       without warning to mean a different Unicode property in a future
       version of the perl interpreter that uses a later Unicode release, and
       your code would no longer work.  The extensions are mentioned here for
       completeness:  Take the block name and prefix it with one of: "In" (for
       example "\p{Blk=Arrows}" can currently be written as "\p{In_Arrows}");
       or sometimes "Is" (like "\p{Is_Arrows}"); or sometimes no prefix at all
       ("\p{Arrows}").  As of this writing (Unicode 9.0) there are no
       conflicts with using the "In_" prefix, but there are plenty with the
       other two forms.  For example, "\p{Is_Hebrew}" and "\p{Hebrew}" mean
       "\p{Script_Extensions=Hebrew}" which is NOT the same thing as
       "\p{Blk=Hebrew}".  Our advice used to be to use the "In_" prefix as a
       single form way of specifying a block.  But Unicode 8.0 added
       properties whose names begin with "In", and it's now clear that it's
       only luck that's so far prevented a conflict.  Using "In" is only
       marginally less typing than "Blk:", and the latter's meaning is clearer
       anyway, and guaranteed to never conflict.  So don't take chances.  Use
       "\p{Blk=foo}" for new code.  And be sure that block is what you really
       really want to do.  In most cases scripts are what you want instead.

       A complete list of blocks is in perluniprops.

       Other Properties

       There are many more properties than the very basic ones described here.
       A complete list is in perluniprops.

       Unicode defines all its properties in the compound form, so all single-
       form properties are Perl extensions.  Most of these are just synonyms
       for the Unicode ones, but some are genuine extensions, including
       several that are in the compound form.  And quite a few of these are
       actually recommended by Unicode (in
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18>).

       This section gives some details on all extensions that aren't just
       synonyms for compound-form Unicode properties (for those properties,
       you'll have to refer to the Unicode Standard
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>.

       "\p{All}"
           This matches every possible code point.  It is equivalent to
           "qr/./s".  Unlike all the other non-user-defined "\p{}" property
           matches, no warning is ever generated if this is property is
           matched against a non-Unicode code point (see "Beyond Unicode code
           points" below).

       "\p{Alnum}"
           This matches any "\p{Alphabetic}" or "\p{Decimal_Number}"
           character.

       "\p{Any}"
           This matches any of the 1_114_112 Unicode code points.  It is a
           synonym for "\p{Unicode}".

       "\p{ASCII}"
           This matches any of the 128 characters in the US-ASCII character
           set, which is a subset of Unicode.

       "\p{Assigned}"
           This matches any assigned code point; that is, any code point whose
           general category is not "Unassigned" (or equivalently, not "Cn").

       "\p{Blank}"
           This is the same as "\h" and "\p{HorizSpace}":  A character that
           changes the spacing horizontally.

       "\p{Decomposition_Type: Non_Canonical}"    (Short: "\p{Dt=NonCanon}")
           Matches a character that has a non-canonical decomposition.

           The "Extended Grapheme Clusters (Logical characters)" section above
           talked about canonical decompositions.  However, many more
           characters have a different type of decomposition, a "compatible"
           or "non-canonical" decomposition.  The sequences that form these
           decompositions are not considered canonically equivalent to the
           pre-composed character.  An example is the "SUPERSCRIPT ONE".  It
           is somewhat like a regular digit 1, but not exactly; its
           decomposition into the digit 1 is called a "compatible"
           decomposition, specifically a "super" decomposition.  There are
           several such compatibility decompositions (see
           <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>), including one called
           "compat", which means some miscellaneous type of decomposition that
           doesn't fit into the other decomposition categories that Unicode
           has chosen.

           Note that most Unicode characters don't have a decomposition, so
           their decomposition type is "None".

           For your convenience, Perl has added the "Non_Canonical"
           decomposition type to mean any of the several compatibility
           decompositions.

       "\p{Graph}"
           Matches any character that is graphic.  Theoretically, this means a
           character that on a printer would cause ink to be used.

       "\p{HorizSpace}"
           This is the same as "\h" and "\p{Blank}":  a character that changes
           the spacing horizontally.

       "\p{In=*}"
           This is a synonym for "\p{Present_In=*}"

       "\p{PerlSpace}"
           This is the same as "\s", restricted to ASCII, namely "[\f\n\r\t]"
           and starting in Perl v5.18, a vertical tab.

           Mnemonic: Perl's (original) space

       "\p{PerlWord}"
           This is the same as "\w", restricted to ASCII, namely
           "[A-Za-z0-9_]"

           Mnemonic: Perl's (original) word.

       "\p{Posix...}"
           There are several of these, which are equivalents, using the "\p{}"
           notation, for Posix classes and are described in "POSIX Character
           Classes" in perlrecharclass.

       "\p{Present_In: *}"    (Short: "\p{In=*}")
           This property is used when you need to know in what Unicode
           version(s) a character is.

           The "*" above stands for some Unicode version number, such as 1.1
           or 12.0; or the "*" can also be "Unassigned".  This property will
           match the code points whose final disposition has been settled as
           of the Unicode release given by the version number; "\p{Present_In:
           Unassigned}" will match those code points whose meaning has yet to
           be assigned.

           For example, "U+0041" "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" was present in the
           very first Unicode release available, which is 1.1, so this
           property is true for all valid "*" versions.  On the other hand,
           "U+1EFF" was not assigned until version 5.1 when it became "LATIN
           SMALL LETTER Y WITH LOOP", so the only "*" that would match it are
           5.1, 5.2, and later.

           Unicode furnishes the "Age" property from which this is derived.
           The problem with Age is that a strict interpretation of it (which
           Perl takes) has it matching the precise release a code point's
           meaning is introduced in.  Thus "U+0041" would match only 1.1; and
           "U+1EFF" only 5.1.  This is not usually what you want.

           Some non-Perl implementations of the Age property may change its
           meaning to be the same as the Perl "Present_In" property; just be
           aware of that.

           Another confusion with both these properties is that the definition
           is not that the code point has been assigned, but that the meaning
           of the code point has been determined.  This is because 66 code
           points will always be unassigned, and so the "Age" for them is the
           Unicode version in which the decision to make them so was made.
           For example, "U+FDD0" is to be permanently unassigned to a
           character, and the decision to do that was made in version 3.1, so
           "\p{Age=3.1}" matches this character, as also does "\p{Present_In:
           3.1}" and up.

       "\p{Print}"
           This matches any character that is graphical or blank, except
           controls.

       "\p{SpacePerl}"
           This is the same as "\s", including beyond ASCII.

           Mnemonic: Space, as modified by Perl.  (It doesn't include the
           vertical tab until v5.18, which both the Posix standard and Unicode
           consider white space.)

       "\p{Title}" and  "\p{Titlecase}"
           Under case-sensitive matching, these both match the same code
           points as "\p{General Category=Titlecase_Letter}" ("\p{gc=lt}").
           The difference is that under "/i" caseless matching, these match
           the same as "\p{Cased}", whereas "\p{gc=lt}" matches
           "\p{Cased_Letter").

       "\p{Unicode}"
           This matches any of the 1_114_112 Unicode code points.  "\p{Any}".

       "\p{VertSpace}"
           This is the same as "\v":  A character that changes the spacing
           vertically.

       "\p{Word}"
           This is the same as "\w", including over 100_000 characters beyond
           ASCII.

       "\p{XPosix...}"
           There are several of these, which are the standard Posix classes
           extended to the full Unicode range.  They are described in "POSIX
           Character Classes" in perlrecharclass.

   Wildcards in Property Values
       Starting in Perl 5.30, it is possible to do do something like this:

        qr!\p{numeric_value=/\A[0-5]\z/}!

       or, by abbreviating and adding "/x",

        qr! \p{nv= /(?x) \A [0-5] \z / }!

       This matches all code points whose numeric value is one of 0, 1, 2, 3,
       4, or 5.  This particular example could instead have been written as

        qr! \A [ \p{nv=0}\p{nv=1}\p{nv=2}\p{nv=3}\p{nv=4}\p{nv=5} ] \z !xx

       in earlier perls, so in this case this feature just makes things easier
       and shorter to write.  If we hadn't included the "\A" and "\z", these
       would have matched things like "1/2" because that contains a 1 (as well
       as a 2).  As written, it matches things like subscripts that have these
       numeric values.  If we only wanted the decimal digits with those
       numeric values, we could say,

        qr! (?[ \d & \p{nv=/[0-5]/ ]) }!x

       The "\d" gets rid of needing to anchor the pattern, since it forces the
       result to only match "[0-9]", and the "[0-5]" further restricts it.

       The text in the above examples enclosed between the "/" characters can
       be just about any regular expression.  It is independent of the main
       pattern, so doesn't share any capturing groups, etc.  The delimiters
       for it must be ASCII punctuation, but it may NOT be delimited by "{",
       nor "}" nor contain a literal "}", as that delimits the end of the
       enclosing "\p{}".  Like any pattern, certain other delimiters are
       terminated by their mirror images.  These are "(", ""["", and "<".  If
       the delimiter is any of "-", "_", "+", or "\", or is the same delimiter
       as is used for the enclosing pattern, it must be be preceded by a
       backslash escape, both fore and aft.

       Beware of using "$" to indicate to match the end of the string.  It can
       too easily be interpreted as being a punctuation variable, like $/.

       No modifiers may follow the final delimiter.  Instead, use
       "(?adlupimnsx-imnsx)" in perlre and/or "(?adluimnsx-imnsx:pattern)" in
       perlre to specify modifiers.

       This feature is not available when the left-hand side is prefixed by
       "Is_", nor for any form that is marked as "Discouraged" in
       "Discouraged" in perluniprops.

       Perl wraps your pattern with "(?iaa: ... )".  This is because nothing
       outside ASCII can match the Unicode property values available in this
       release, and they should match caselessly.  If your pattern has a
       syntax error, this wrapping will be shown in the error message, even
       though you didn't specify it yourself.  This could be confusing if you
       don't know about this.

       This experimental feature has been added to begin to implement
       <https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/#Wildcard_Properties>.  Using it
       will raise a (default-on) warning in the
       "experimental::uniprop_wildcards" category.  We reserve the right to
       change its operation as we gain experience.

       Your subpattern can be just about anything, but for it to have some
       utility, it should match when called with either or both of a) the full
       name of the property value with underscores (and/or spaces in the Block
       property) and some things uppercase; or b) the property value in all
       lowercase with spaces and underscores squeezed out.  For example,

        qr!\p{Blk=/Old I.*/}!
        qr!\p{Blk=/oldi.*/}!

       would match the same things.

       A warning is issued if none of the legal values for a property are
       matched by your pattern.  It's likely that a future release will raise
       a warning if your pattern ends up causing every possible code point to
       match.

       Another example that shows that within "\p{...}", "/x" isn't needed to
       have spaces:

        qr!\p{scx= /Hebrew|Greek/ }!

       To be safe, we should have anchored the above example, to prevent
       matches for something like "Hebrew_Braile", but there aren't any script
       names like that.

       There are certain properties that it doesn't currently work with.
       These are:

        Bidi Mirroring Glyph
        Bidi Paired Bracket
        Case Folding
        Decomposition Mapping
        Equivalent Unified Ideograph
        Name
        Name Alias
        Lowercase Mapping
        NFKC Case Fold
        Titlecase Mapping
        Uppercase Mapping

       Nor is the "@unicode_property@" form implemented.

       Here's a complete example of matching IPV4 internet protocol addresses
       in any (single) script

        no warnings 'experimental::script_run';
        no warnings 'experimental::regex_sets';
        no warnings 'experimental::uniprop_wildcards';

        # Can match a substring, so this intermediate regex needs to have
        # context or anchoring in its final use.  Using nt=de yields decimal
        # digits.  When specifying a subset of these, we must include \d to
        # prevent things like U+00B2 SUPERSCRIPT TWO from matching
        my $zero_through_255 =
         qr/ \b (*sr:                                  # All from same sript
                   (?[ \p{nv=0} & \d ])*               # Optional leading zeros
               (                                       # Then one of:
                                         \d{1,2}       #   0 - 99
                   | (?[ \p{nv=1} & \d ])  \d{2}       #   100 - 199
                   | (?[ \p{nv=2} & \d ])
                      (  (?[ \p{nv=:[0-4]:} & \d ]) \d #   200 - 249
                       | (?[ \p{nv=5}     & \d ])
                         (?[ \p{nv=:[0-5]:} & \d ])    #   250 - 255
                      )
               )
             )
           \b
         /x;

        my $ipv4 = qr/ \A (*sr:         $zero_through_255
                                (?: [.] $zero_through_255 ) {3}
                          )
                       \z
                   /x;

   User-Defined Character Properties
       You can define your own binary character properties by defining
       subroutines whose names begin with "In" or "Is".  (The experimental
       feature "(?[ ])" in perlre provides an alternative which allows more
       complex definitions.)  The subroutines can be defined in any package.
       The user-defined properties can be used in the regular expression
       "\p{}" and "\P{}" constructs; if you are using a user-defined property
       from a package other than the one you are in, you must specify its
       package in the "\p{}" or "\P{}" construct.

           # assuming property Is_Foreign defined in Lang::
           package main;  # property package name required
           if ($txt =~ /\p{Lang::IsForeign}+/) { ... }

           package Lang;  # property package name not required
           if ($txt =~ /\p{IsForeign}+/) { ... }

       Note that the effect is compile-time and immutable once defined.
       However, the subroutines are passed a single parameter, which is 0 if
       case-sensitive matching is in effect and non-zero if caseless matching
       is in effect.  The subroutine may return different values depending on
       the value of the flag, and one set of values will immutably be in
       effect for all case-sensitive matches, and the other set for all case-
       insensitive matches.

       Note that if the regular expression is tainted, then Perl will die
       rather than calling the subroutine when the name of the subroutine is
       determined by the tainted data.

       The subroutines must return a specially-formatted string, with one or
       more newline-separated lines.  Each line must be one of the following:

       o   A single hexadecimal number denoting a code point to include.

       o   Two hexadecimal numbers separated by horizontal whitespace (space
           or tabular characters) denoting a range of code points to include.
           The second number must not be smaller than the first.

       o   Something to include, prefixed by "+": a built-in character
           property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a fully qualified (including
           package name) user-defined character property, to represent all the
           characters in that property; two hexadecimal code points for a
           range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

       o   Something to exclude, prefixed by "-": an existing character
           property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a fully qualified (including
           package name) user-defined character property, to represent all the
           characters in that property; two hexadecimal code points for a
           range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

       o   Something to negate, prefixed "!": an existing character property
           (prefixed by "utf8::") or a fully qualified (including package
           name) user-defined character property, to represent all the
           characters in that property; two hexadecimal code points for a
           range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

       o   Something to intersect with, prefixed by "&": an existing character
           property (prefixed by "utf8::") or a fully qualified (including
           package name) user-defined character property, for all the
           characters except the characters in the property; two hexadecimal
           code points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.

       For example, to define a property that covers both the Japanese
       syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), you can define

           sub InKana {
               return <<END;
           3040\t309F
           30A0\t30FF
           END
           }

       Imagine that the here-doc end marker is at the beginning of the line.
       Now you can use "\p{InKana}" and "\P{InKana}".

       You could also have used the existing block property names:

           sub InKana {
               return <<'END';
           +utf8::InHiragana
           +utf8::InKatakana
           END
           }

       Suppose you wanted to match only the allocated characters, not the raw
       block ranges: in other words, you want to remove the unassigned
       characters:

           sub InKana {
               return <<'END';
           +utf8::InHiragana
           +utf8::InKatakana
           -utf8::IsCn
           END
           }

       The negation is useful for defining (surprise!) negated classes.

           sub InNotKana {
               return <<'END';
           !utf8::InHiragana
           -utf8::InKatakana
           +utf8::IsCn
           END
           }

       This will match all non-Unicode code points, since every one of them is
       not in Kana.  You can use intersection to exclude these, if desired, as
       this modified example shows:

           sub InNotKana {
               return <<'END';
           !utf8::InHiragana
           -utf8::InKatakana
           +utf8::IsCn
           &utf8::Any
           END
           }

       &utf8::Any must be the last line in the definition.

       Intersection is used generally for getting the common characters
       matched by two (or more) classes.  It's important to remember not to
       use "&" for the first set; that would be intersecting with nothing,
       resulting in an empty set.  (Similarly using "-" for the first set does
       nothing).

       Unlike non-user-defined "\p{}" property matches, no warning is ever
       generated if these properties are matched against a non-Unicode code
       point (see "Beyond Unicode code points" below).

   User-Defined Case Mappings (for serious hackers only)
       This feature has been removed as of Perl 5.16.  The CPAN module
       "Unicode::Casing" provides better functionality without the drawbacks
       that this feature had.  If you are using a Perl earlier than 5.16, this
       feature was most fully documented in the 5.14 version of this pod:
       <http://perldoc.perl.org/5.14.0/perlunicode.html#User-Defined-Case-Mappings-%28for-serious-hackers-only%29>

   Character Encodings for Input and Output
       See Encode.

   Unicode Regular Expression Support Level
       The following list of Unicode supported features for regular
       expressions describes all features currently directly supported by core
       Perl.  The references to "Level N" and the section numbers refer to
       UTS#18 "Unicode Regular Expressions"
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18>, version 18, October 2016.

       Level 1 - Basic Unicode Support

        RL1.1   Hex Notation                     - Done          [1]
        RL1.2   Properties                       - Done          [2]
        RL1.2a  Compatibility Properties         - Done          [3]
        RL1.3   Subtraction and Intersection     - Experimental  [4]
        RL1.4   Simple Word Boundaries           - Done          [5]
        RL1.5   Simple Loose Matches             - Done          [6]
        RL1.6   Line Boundaries                  - Partial       [7]
        RL1.7   Supplementary Code Points        - Done          [8]

       [1] "\N{U+...}" and "\x{...}"
       [2] "\p{...}" "\P{...}".  This requirement is for a minimal list of
       properties.  Perl supports these and all other Unicode character
       properties, as R2.7 asks (see "Unicode Character Properties" above).
       [3] Perl has "\d" "\D" "\s" "\S" "\w" "\W" "\X" "[:prop:]" "[:^prop:]",
       plus all the properties specified by
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/#Compatibility_Properties>.  These
       are described above in "Other Properties"
       [4] The experimental feature "(?[...])" starting in v5.18 accomplishes
           this.

           See "(?[ ])" in perlre.  If you don't want to use an experimental
           feature, you can use one of the following:

           o   Regular expression lookahead

               You can mimic class subtraction using lookahead.  For example,
               what UTS#18 might write as

                   [{Block=Greek}-[{UNASSIGNED}]]

               in Perl can be written as:

                   (?!\p{Unassigned})\p{Block=Greek}
                   (?=\p{Assigned})\p{Block=Greek}

               But in this particular example, you probably really want

                   \p{Greek}

               which will match assigned characters known to be part of the
               Greek script.

           o   CPAN module "Unicode::Regex::Set"

               It does implement the full UTS#18 grouping, intersection,
               union, and removal (subtraction) syntax.

           o   "User-Defined Character Properties"

               "+" for union, "-" for removal (set-difference), "&" for
               intersection

       [5] "\b" "\B" meet most, but not all, the details of this requirement,
       but "\b{wb}" and "\B{wb}" do, as well as the stricter R2.3.
       [6] Note that Perl does Full case-folding in matching, not Simple:

           For example "U+1F88" is equivalent to "U+1F00 U+03B9", instead of
           just "U+1F80".  This difference matters mainly for certain Greek
           capital letters with certain modifiers: the Full case-folding
           decomposes the letter, while the Simple case-folding would map it
           to a single character.

       [7] The reason this is considered to be only partially implemented is
           that Perl has "qr/\b{lb}/" and "Unicode::LineBreak" that are
           conformant with UAX#14 "Unicode Line Breaking Algorithm"
           <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14>.  The regular expression
           construct provides default behavior, while the heavier-weight
           module provides customizable line breaking.

           But Perl treats "\n" as the start- and end-line delimiter, whereas
           Unicode specifies more characters that should be so-interpreted.

           These are:

            VT   U+000B  (\v in C)
            FF   U+000C  (\f)
            CR   U+000D  (\r)
            NEL  U+0085
            LS   U+2028
            PS   U+2029

           "^" and "$" in regular expression patterns are supposed to match
           all these, but don't.  These characters also don't, but should,
           affect "<>" $., and script line numbers.

           Also, lines should not be split within "CRLF" (i.e. there is no
           empty line between "\r" and "\n").  For "CRLF", try the ":crlf"
           layer (see PerlIO).

       [8] UTF-8/UTF-EBDDIC used in Perl allows not only "U+10000" to
       "U+10FFFF" but also beyond "U+10FFFF"

       Level 2 - Extended Unicode Support

        RL2.1   Canonical Equivalents           - Retracted     [9]
                                                  by Unicode
        RL2.2   Extended Grapheme Clusters      - Partial       [10]
        RL2.3   Default Word Boundaries         - Done          [11]
        RL2.4   Default Case Conversion         - Done
        RL2.5   Name Properties                 - Done
        RL2.6   Wildcards in Property Values    - Partial       [12]
        RL2.7   Full Properties                 - Done

       [9] Unicode has rewritten this portion of UTS#18 to say that getting
       canonical equivalence (see UAX#15 "Unicode Normalization Forms"
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15>) is basically to be done at the
       programmer level.  Use NFD to write both your regular expressions and
       text to match them against (you can use Unicode::Normalize).
       [10] Perl has "\X" and "\b{gcb}" but we don't have a "Grapheme Cluster
       Mode".
       [11] see UAX#29 "Unicode Text Segmentation"
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29>,
       [12] see "Wildcards in Property Values" above.

       Level 3 - Tailored Support

        RL3.1   Tailored Punctuation            - Missing
        RL3.2   Tailored Grapheme Clusters      - Missing       [13]
        RL3.3   Tailored Word Boundaries        - Missing
        RL3.4   Tailored Loose Matches          - Retracted by Unicode
        RL3.5   Tailored Ranges                 - Retracted by Unicode
        RL3.6   Context Matching                - Partial       [14]
        RL3.7   Incremental Matches             - Missing
        RL3.8   Unicode Set Sharing             - Retracted by Unicode
        RL3.9   Possible Match Sets             - Missing
        RL3.10  Folded Matching                 - Retracted by Unicode
        RL3.11  Submatchers                     - Partial       [15]

       [13] Perl has Unicode::Collate, but it isn't integrated with regular
       expressions.  See UTS#10 "Unicode Collation Algorithms"
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10>.
       [14] Perl has "(?<=x)" and "(?=x)", but this requirement says that it
       should be possible to specify that matches may occur only in a
       substring with the lookaheads and lookbehinds able to see beyond that
       matchable portion.
       [15] Perl has user-defined properties ("User-Defined Character
       Properties") to look at single code points in ways beyond Unicode, and
       it might be possible, though probably not very clean, to use code
       blocks and things like "(?(DEFINE)...)" (see perlre) to do more
       specialized matching.

   Unicode Encodings
       Unicode characters are assigned to code points, which are abstract
       numbers.  To use these numbers, various encodings are needed.

       o   UTF-8

           UTF-8 is a variable-length (1 to 4 bytes), byte-order independent
           encoding.  In most of Perl's documentation, including elsewhere in
           this document, the term "UTF-8" means also "UTF-EBCDIC".  But in
           this section, "UTF-8" refers only to the encoding used on ASCII
           platforms.  It is a superset of 7-bit US-ASCII, so anything encoded
           in ASCII has the identical representation when encoded in UTF-8.

           The following table is from Unicode 3.2.

            Code Points            1st Byte  2nd Byte  3rd Byte 4th Byte

              U+0000..U+007F       00..7F
              U+0080..U+07FF     * C2..DF    80..BF
              U+0800..U+0FFF       E0      * A0..BF    80..BF
              U+1000..U+CFFF       E1..EC    80..BF    80..BF
              U+D000..U+D7FF       ED        80..9F    80..BF
              U+D800..U+DFFF       +++++ utf16 surrogates, not legal utf8 +++++
              U+E000..U+FFFF       EE..EF    80..BF    80..BF
             U+10000..U+3FFFF      F0      * 90..BF    80..BF    80..BF
             U+40000..U+FFFFF      F1..F3    80..BF    80..BF    80..BF
            U+100000..U+10FFFF     F4        80..8F    80..BF    80..BF

           Note the gaps marked by "*" before several of the byte entries
           above.  These are caused by legal UTF-8 avoiding non-shortest
           encodings: it is technically possible to UTF-8-encode a single code
           point in different ways, but that is explicitly forbidden, and the
           shortest possible encoding should always be used (and that is what
           Perl does).

           Another way to look at it is via bits:

                           Code Points  1st Byte  2nd Byte  3rd Byte  4th Byte

                              0aaaaaaa  0aaaaaaa
                      00000bbbbbaaaaaa  110bbbbb  10aaaaaa
                      ccccbbbbbbaaaaaa  1110cccc  10bbbbbb  10aaaaaa
            00000dddccccccbbbbbbaaaaaa  11110ddd  10cccccc  10bbbbbb  10aaaaaa

           As you can see, the continuation bytes all begin with "10", and the
           leading bits of the start byte tell how many bytes there are in the
           encoded character.

           The original UTF-8 specification allowed up to 6 bytes, to allow
           encoding of numbers up to "0x7FFF_FFFF".  Perl continues to allow
           those, and has extended that up to 13 bytes to encode code points
           up to what can fit in a 64-bit word.  However, Perl will warn if
           you output any of these as being non-portable; and under strict
           UTF-8 input protocols, they are forbidden.  In addition, it is now
           illegal to use a code point larger than what a signed integer
           variable on your system can hold.  On 32-bit ASCII systems, this
           means "0x7FFF_FFFF" is the legal maximum (much higher on 64-bit
           systems).

       o   UTF-EBCDIC

           Like UTF-8, but EBCDIC-safe, in the way that UTF-8 is ASCII-safe.
           This means that all the basic characters (which includes all those
           that have ASCII equivalents (like "A", "0", "%", etc.)  are the
           same in both EBCDIC and UTF-EBCDIC.)

           UTF-EBCDIC is used on EBCDIC platforms.  It generally requires more
           bytes to represent a given code point than UTF-8 does; the largest
           Unicode code points take 5 bytes to represent (instead of 4 in
           UTF-8), and, extended for 64-bit words, it uses 14 bytes instead of
           13 bytes in UTF-8.

       o   UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, Surrogates, and "BOM"'s (Byte Order
           Marks)

           The followings items are mostly for reference and general Unicode
           knowledge, Perl doesn't use these constructs internally.

           Like UTF-8, UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding, but where UTF-8
           uses 8-bit code units, UTF-16 uses 16-bit code units.  All code
           points occupy either 2 or 4 bytes in UTF-16: code points
           "U+0000..U+FFFF" are stored in a single 16-bit unit, and code
           points "U+10000..U+10FFFF" in two 16-bit units.  The latter case is
           using surrogates, the first 16-bit unit being the high surrogate,
           and the second being the low surrogate.

           Surrogates are code points set aside to encode the
           "U+10000..U+10FFFF" range of Unicode code points in pairs of 16-bit
           units.  The high surrogates are the range "U+D800..U+DBFF" and the
           low surrogates are the range "U+DC00..U+DFFF".  The surrogate
           encoding is

               $hi = ($uni - 0x10000) / 0x400 + 0xD800;
               $lo = ($uni - 0x10000) % 0x400 + 0xDC00;

           and the decoding is

               $uni = 0x10000 + ($hi - 0xD800) * 0x400 + ($lo - 0xDC00);

           Because of the 16-bitness, UTF-16 is byte-order dependent.  UTF-16
           itself can be used for in-memory computations, but if storage or
           transfer is required either UTF-16BE (big-endian) or UTF-16LE
           (little-endian) encodings must be chosen.

           This introduces another problem: what if you just know that your
           data is UTF-16, but you don't know which endianness?  Byte Order
           Marks, or "BOM"'s, are a solution to this.  A special character has
           been reserved in Unicode to function as a byte order marker: the
           character with the code point "U+FEFF" is the "BOM".

           The trick is that if you read a "BOM", you will know the byte
           order, since if it was written on a big-endian platform, you will
           read the bytes "0xFE 0xFF", but if it was written on a little-
           endian platform, you will read the bytes "0xFF 0xFE".  (And if the
           originating platform was writing in ASCII platform UTF-8, you will
           read the bytes "0xEF 0xBB 0xBF".)

           The way this trick works is that the character with the code point
           "U+FFFE" is not supposed to be in input streams, so the sequence of
           bytes "0xFF 0xFE" is unambiguously ""BOM", represented in little-
           endian format" and cannot be "U+FFFE", represented in big-endian
           format".

           Surrogates have no meaning in Unicode outside their use in pairs to
           represent other code points.  However, Perl allows them to be
           represented individually internally, for example by saying
           "chr(0xD801)", so that all code points, not just those valid for
           open interchange, are representable.  Unicode does define semantics
           for them, such as their "General_Category" is "Cs".  But because
           their use is somewhat dangerous, Perl will warn (using the warning
           category "surrogate", which is a sub-category of "utf8") if an
           attempt is made to do things like take the lower case of one, or
           match case-insensitively, or to output them.  (But don't try this
           on Perls before 5.14.)

       o   UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE

           The UTF-32 family is pretty much like the UTF-16 family, except
           that the units are 32-bit, and therefore the surrogate scheme is
           not needed.  UTF-32 is a fixed-width encoding.  The "BOM"
           signatures are "0x00 0x00 0xFE 0xFF" for BE and "0xFF 0xFE 0x00
           0x00" for LE.

       o   UCS-2, UCS-4

           Legacy, fixed-width encodings defined by the ISO 10646 standard.
           UCS-2 is a 16-bit encoding.  Unlike UTF-16, UCS-2 is not extensible
           beyond "U+FFFF", because it does not use surrogates.  UCS-4 is a
           32-bit encoding, functionally identical to UTF-32 (the difference
           being that UCS-4 forbids neither surrogates nor code points larger
           than "0x10_FFFF").

       o   UTF-7

           A seven-bit safe (non-eight-bit) encoding, which is useful if the
           transport or storage is not eight-bit safe.  Defined by RFC 2152.

   Noncharacter code points
       66 code points are set aside in Unicode as "noncharacter code points".
       These all have the "Unassigned" ("Cn") "General_Category", and no
       character will ever be assigned to any of them.  They are the 32 code
       points between "U+FDD0" and "U+FDEF" inclusive, and the 34 code points:

        U+FFFE   U+FFFF
        U+1FFFE  U+1FFFF
        U+2FFFE  U+2FFFF
        ...
        U+EFFFE  U+EFFFF
        U+FFFFE  U+FFFFF
        U+10FFFE U+10FFFF

       Until Unicode 7.0, the noncharacters were "forbidden for use in open
       interchange of Unicode text data", so that code that processed those
       streams could use these code points as sentinels that could be mixed in
       with character data, and would always be distinguishable from that
       data.  (Emphasis above and in the next paragraph are added in this
       document.)

       Unicode 7.0 changed the wording so that they are "not recommended for
       use in open interchange of Unicode text data".  The 7.0 Standard goes
       on to say:

           "If a noncharacter is received in open interchange, an application
           is not required to interpret it in any way.  It is good practice,
           however, to recognize it as a noncharacter and to take appropriate
           action, such as replacing it with "U+FFFD" replacement character,
           to indicate the problem in the text.  It is not recommended to
           simply delete noncharacter code points from such text, because of
           the potential security issues caused by deleting uninterpreted
           characters.  (See conformance clause C7 in Section 3.2, Conformance
           Requirements, and Unicode Technical Report #36, "Unicode Security
           Considerations"
           <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/#Substituting_for_Ill_Formed_Subsequences>)."

       This change was made because it was found that various commercial tools
       like editors, or for things like source code control, had been written
       so that they would not handle program files that used these code
       points, effectively precluding their use almost entirely!  And that was
       never the intent.  They've always been meant to be usable within an
       application, or cooperating set of applications, at will.

       If you're writing code, such as an editor, that is supposed to be able
       to handle any Unicode text data, then you shouldn't be using these code
       points yourself, and instead allow them in the input.  If you need
       sentinels, they should instead be something that isn't legal Unicode.
       For UTF-8 data, you can use the bytes 0xC1 and 0xC2 as sentinels, as
       they never appear in well-formed UTF-8.  (There are equivalents for
       UTF-EBCDIC).  You can also store your Unicode code points in integer
       variables and use negative values as sentinels.

       If you're not writing such a tool, then whether you accept
       noncharacters as input is up to you (though the Standard recommends
       that you not).  If you do strict input stream checking with Perl, these
       code points continue to be forbidden.  This is to maintain backward
       compatibility (otherwise potential security holes could open up, as an
       unsuspecting application that was written assuming the noncharacters
       would be filtered out before getting to it, could now, without warning,
       start getting them).  To do strict checking, you can use the layer
       ":encoding('UTF-8')".

       Perl continues to warn (using the warning category "nonchar", which is
       a sub-category of "utf8") if an attempt is made to output
       noncharacters.

   Beyond Unicode code points
       The maximum Unicode code point is "U+10FFFF", and Unicode only defines
       operations on code points up through that.  But Perl works on code
       points up to the maximum permissible signed number available on the
       platform.  However, Perl will not accept these from input streams
       unless lax rules are being used, and will warn (using the warning
       category "non_unicode", which is a sub-category of "utf8") if any are
       output.

       Since Unicode rules are not defined on these code points, if a Unicode-
       defined operation is done on them, Perl uses what we believe are
       sensible rules, while generally warning, using the "non_unicode"
       category.  For example, "uc("\x{11_0000}")" will generate such a
       warning, returning the input parameter as its result, since Perl
       defines the uppercase of every non-Unicode code point to be the code
       point itself.  (All the case changing operations, not just uppercasing,
       work this way.)

       The situation with matching Unicode properties in regular expressions,
       the "\p{}" and "\P{}" constructs, against these code points is not as
       clear cut, and how these are handled has changed as we've gained
       experience.

       One possibility is to treat any match against these code points as
       undefined.  But since Perl doesn't have the concept of a match being
       undefined, it converts this to failing or "FALSE".  This is almost, but
       not quite, what Perl did from v5.14 (when use of these code points
       became generally reliable) through v5.18.  The difference is that Perl
       treated all "\p{}" matches as failing, but all "\P{}" matches as
       succeeding.

       One problem with this is that it leads to unexpected, and confusing
       results in some cases:

        chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=True}      # Failed on <= v5.18
        chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=False}     # Failed! on <= v5.18

       That is, it treated both matches as undefined, and converted that to
       false (raising a warning on each).  The first case is the expected
       result, but the second is likely counterintuitive: "How could both be
       false when they are complements?"  Another problem was that the
       implementation optimized many Unicode property matches down to already
       existing simpler, faster operations, which don't raise the warning.  We
       chose to not forgo those optimizations, which help the vast majority of
       matches, just to generate a warning for the unlikely event that an
       above-Unicode code point is being matched against.

       As a result of these problems, starting in v5.20, what Perl does is to
       treat non-Unicode code points as just typical unassigned Unicode
       characters, and matches accordingly.  (Note: Unicode has atypical
       unassigned code points.  For example, it has noncharacter code points,
       and ones that, when they do get assigned, are destined to be written
       Right-to-left, as Arabic and Hebrew are.  Perl assumes that no non-
       Unicode code point has any atypical properties.)

       Perl, in most cases, will raise a warning when matching an above-
       Unicode code point against a Unicode property when the result is "TRUE"
       for "\p{}", and "FALSE" for "\P{}".  For example:

        chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=True}      # Fails, no warning
        chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=False}     # Succeeds, with warning

       In both these examples, the character being matched is non-Unicode, so
       Unicode doesn't define how it should match.  It clearly isn't an ASCII
       hex digit, so the first example clearly should fail, and so it does,
       with no warning.  But it is arguable that the second example should
       have an undefined, hence "FALSE", result.  So a warning is raised for
       it.

       Thus the warning is raised for many fewer cases than in earlier Perls,
       and only when what the result is could be arguable.  It turns out that
       none of the optimizations made by Perl (or are ever likely to be made)
       cause the warning to be skipped, so it solves both problems of Perl's
       earlier approach.  The most commonly used property that is affected by
       this change is "\p{Unassigned}" which is a short form for
       "\p{General_Category=Unassigned}".  Starting in v5.20, all non-Unicode
       code points are considered "Unassigned".  In earlier releases the
       matches failed because the result was considered undefined.

       The only place where the warning is not raised when it might ought to
       have been is if optimizations cause the whole pattern match to not even
       be attempted.  For example, Perl may figure out that for a string to
       match a certain regular expression pattern, the string has to contain
       the substring "foobar".  Before attempting the match, Perl may look for
       that substring, and if not found, immediately fail the match without
       actually trying it; so no warning gets generated even if the string
       contains an above-Unicode code point.

       This behavior is more "Do what I mean" than in earlier Perls for most
       applications.  But it catches fewer issues for code that needs to be
       strictly Unicode compliant.  Therefore there is an additional mode of
       operation available to accommodate such code.  This mode is enabled if
       a regular expression pattern is compiled within the lexical scope where
       the "non_unicode" warning class has been made fatal, say by:

        use warnings FATAL => "non_unicode"

       (see warnings).  In this mode of operation, Perl will raise the warning
       for all matches against a non-Unicode code point (not just the arguable
       ones), and it skips the optimizations that might cause the warning to
       not be output.  (It currently still won't warn if the match isn't even
       attempted, like in the "foobar" example above.)

       In summary, Perl now normally treats non-Unicode code points as typical
       Unicode unassigned code points for regular expression matches, raising
       a warning only when it is arguable what the result should be.  However,
       if this warning has been made fatal, it isn't skipped.

       There is one exception to all this.  "\p{All}" looks like a Unicode
       property, but it is a Perl extension that is defined to be true for all
       possible code points, Unicode or not, so no warning is ever generated
       when matching this against a non-Unicode code point.  (Prior to v5.20,
       it was an exact synonym for "\p{Any}", matching code points 0 through
       0x10FFFF.)

   Security Implications of Unicode
       First, read Unicode Security Considerations
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36>.

       Also, note the following:

       o   Malformed UTF-8

           UTF-8 is very structured, so many combinations of bytes are
           invalid.  In the past, Perl tried to soldier on and make some sense
           of invalid combinations, but this can lead to security holes, so
           now, if the Perl core needs to process an invalid combination, it
           will either raise a fatal error, or will replace those bytes by the
           sequence that forms the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER, for which
           purpose Unicode created it.

           Every code point can be represented by more than one possible
           syntactically valid UTF-8 sequence.  Early on, both Unicode and
           Perl considered any of these to be valid, but now, all sequences
           longer than the shortest possible one are considered to be
           malformed.

           Unicode considers many code points to be illegal, or to be avoided.
           Perl generally accepts them, once they have passed through any
           input filters that may try to exclude them.  These have been
           discussed above (see "Surrogates" under UTF-16 in "Unicode
           Encodings", "Noncharacter code points", and "Beyond Unicode code
           points").

       o   Regular expression pattern matching may surprise you if you're not
           accustomed to Unicode.  Starting in Perl 5.14, several pattern
           modifiers are available to control this, called the character set
           modifiers.  Details are given in "Character set modifiers" in
           perlre.

       As discussed elsewhere, Perl has one foot (two hooves?) planted in each
       of two worlds: the old world of ASCII and single-byte locales, and the
       new world of Unicode, upgrading when necessary.  If your legacy code
       does not explicitly use Unicode, no automatic switch-over to Unicode
       should happen.

   Unicode in Perl on EBCDIC
       Unicode is supported on EBCDIC platforms.  See perlebcdic.

       Unless ASCII vs. EBCDIC issues are specifically being discussed,
       references to UTF-8 encoding in this document and elsewhere should be
       read as meaning UTF-EBCDIC on EBCDIC platforms.  See "Unicode and UTF"
       in perlebcdic.

       Because UTF-EBCDIC is so similar to UTF-8, the differences are mostly
       hidden from you; "useutf8" (and NOT something like "useutfebcdic")
       declares the script is in the platform's "native" 8-bit encoding of
       Unicode.  (Similarly for the ":utf8" layer.)

   Locales
       See "Unicode and UTF-8" in perllocale

   When Unicode Does Not Happen
       There are still many places where Unicode (in some encoding or another)
       could be given as arguments or received as results, or both in Perl,
       but it is not, in spite of Perl having extensive ways to input and
       output in Unicode, and a few other "entry points" like the @ARGV array
       (which can sometimes be interpreted as UTF-8).

       The following are such interfaces.  Also, see "The "Unicode Bug"".  For
       all of these interfaces Perl currently (as of v5.16.0) simply assumes
       byte strings both as arguments and results, or UTF-8 strings if the
       (deprecated) "encoding" pragma has been used.

       One reason that Perl does not attempt to resolve the role of Unicode in
       these situations is that the answers are highly dependent on the
       operating system and the file system(s).  For example, whether
       filenames can be in Unicode and in exactly what kind of encoding, is
       not exactly a portable concept.  Similarly for "qx" and "system": how
       well will the "command-line interface" (and which of them?) handle
       Unicode?

       o   "chdir", "chmod", "chown", "chroot", "exec", "link", "lstat",
           "mkdir", "rename", "rmdir", "stat", "symlink", "truncate",
           "unlink", "utime", "-X"

       o   %ENV

       o   "glob" (aka the "<*>")

       o   "open", "opendir", "sysopen"

       o   "qx" (aka the backtick operator), "system"

       o   "readdir", "readlink"

   The "Unicode Bug"
       The term, "Unicode bug" has been applied to an inconsistency with the
       code points in the "Latin-1 Supplement" block, that is, between 128 and
       255.  Without a locale specified, unlike all other characters or code
       points, these characters can have very different semantics depending on
       the rules in effect.  (Characters whose code points are above 255 force
       Unicode rules; whereas the rules for ASCII characters are the same
       under both ASCII and Unicode rules.)

       Under Unicode rules, these upper-Latin1 characters are interpreted as
       Unicode code points, which means they have the same semantics as
       Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and C1 controls.

       As explained in "ASCII Rules versus Unicode Rules", under ASCII rules,
       they are considered to be unassigned characters.

       This can lead to unexpected results.  For example, a string's semantics
       can suddenly change if a code point above 255 is appended to it, which
       changes the rules from ASCII to Unicode.  As an example, consider the
       following program and its output:

        $ perl -le'
            no feature "unicode_strings";
            $s1 = "\xC2";
            $s2 = "\x{2660}";
            for ($s1, $s2, $s1.$s2) {
                print /\w/ || 0;
            }
        '
        0
        0
        1

       If there's no "\w" in "s1" nor in "s2", why does their concatenation
       have one?

       This anomaly stems from Perl's attempt to not disturb older programs
       that didn't use Unicode, along with Perl's desire to add Unicode
       support seamlessly.  But the result turned out to not be seamless.  (By
       the way, you can choose to be warned when things like this happen.  See
       "encoding::warnings".)

       "usefeature'unicode_strings'" was added, starting in Perl v5.12, to
       address this problem.  It affects these things:

       o   Changing the case of a scalar, that is, using "uc()", "ucfirst()",
           "lc()", and "lcfirst()", or "\L", "\U", "\u" and "\l" in double-
           quotish contexts, such as regular expression substitutions.

           Under "unicode_strings" starting in Perl 5.12.0, Unicode rules are
           generally used.  See "lc" in perlfunc for details on how this works
           in combination with various other pragmas.

       o   Using caseless ("/i") regular expression matching.

           Starting in Perl 5.14.0, regular expressions compiled within the
           scope of "unicode_strings" use Unicode rules even when executed or
           compiled into larger regular expressions outside the scope.

       o   Matching any of several properties in regular expressions.

           These properties are "\b" (without braces), "\B" (without braces),
           "\s", "\S", "\w", "\W", and all the Posix character classes except
           "[[:ascii:]]".

           Starting in Perl 5.14.0, regular expressions compiled within the
           scope of "unicode_strings" use Unicode rules even when executed or
           compiled into larger regular expressions outside the scope.

       o   In "quotemeta" or its inline equivalent "\Q".

           Starting in Perl 5.16.0, consistent quoting rules are used within
           the scope of "unicode_strings", as described in "quotemeta" in
           perlfunc.  Prior to that, or outside its scope, no code points
           above 127 are quoted in UTF-8 encoded strings, but in byte encoded
           strings, code points between 128-255 are always quoted.

       o   In the ".." or range operator.

           Starting in Perl 5.26.0, the range operator on strings treats their
           lengths consistently within the scope of "unicode_strings". Prior
           to that, or outside its scope, it could produce strings whose
           length in characters exceeded that of the right-hand side, where
           the right-hand side took up more bytes than the correct range
           endpoint.

       o   In "split"'s special-case whitespace splitting.

           Starting in Perl 5.28.0, the "split" function with a pattern
           specified as a string containing a single space handles whitespace
           characters consistently within the scope of of "unicode_strings".
           Prior to that, or outside its scope, characters that are whitespace
           according to Unicode rules but not according to ASCII rules were
           treated as field contents rather than field separators when they
           appear in byte-encoded strings.

       You can see from the above that the effect of "unicode_strings"
       increased over several Perl releases.  (And Perl's support for Unicode
       continues to improve; it's best to use the latest available release in
       order to get the most complete and accurate results possible.)  Note
       that "unicode_strings" is automatically chosen if you "use5.012" or
       higher.

       For Perls earlier than those described above, or when a string is
       passed to a function outside the scope of "unicode_strings", see the
       next section.

   Forcing Unicode in Perl (Or Unforcing Unicode in Perl)
       Sometimes (see "When Unicode Does Not Happen" or "The "Unicode Bug"")
       there are situations where you simply need to force a byte string into
       UTF-8, or vice versa.  The standard module Encode can be used for this,
       or the low-level calls "utf8::upgrade($bytestring)" and
       "utf8::downgrade($utf8string[, FAIL_OK])".

       Note that "utf8::downgrade()" can fail if the string contains
       characters that don't fit into a byte.

       Calling either function on a string that already is in the desired
       state is a no-op.

       "ASCII Rules versus Unicode Rules" gives all the ways that a string is
       made to use Unicode rules.

   Using Unicode in XS
       See "Unicode Support" in perlguts for an introduction to Unicode at the
       XS level, and "Unicode Support" in perlapi for the API details.

   Hacking Perl to work on earlier Unicode versions (for very serious hackers
       only)
       Perl by default comes with the latest supported Unicode version built-
       in, but the goal is to allow you to change to use any earlier one.  In
       Perls v5.20 and v5.22, however, the earliest usable version is Unicode
       5.1.  Perl v5.18 and v5.24 are able to handle all earlier versions.

       Download the files in the desired version of Unicode from the Unicode
       web site <http://www.unicode.org>).  These should replace the existing
       files in lib/unicore in the Perl source tree.  Follow the instructions
       in README.perl in that directory to change some of their names, and
       then build perl (see INSTALL).

   Porting code from perl-5.6.X
       Perls starting in 5.8 have a different Unicode model from 5.6. In 5.6
       the programmer was required to use the "utf8" pragma to declare that a
       given scope expected to deal with Unicode data and had to make sure
       that only Unicode data were reaching that scope. If you have code that
       is working with 5.6, you will need some of the following adjustments to
       your code. The examples are written such that the code will continue to
       work under 5.6, so you should be safe to try them out.

       o  A filehandle that should read or write UTF-8

            if ($] > 5.008) {
              binmode $fh, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
            }

       o  A scalar that is going to be passed to some extension

          Be it "Compress::Zlib", "Apache::Request" or any extension that has
          no mention of Unicode in the manpage, you need to make sure that the
          UTF8 flag is stripped off. Note that at the time of this writing
          (January 2012) the mentioned modules are not UTF-8-aware. Please
          check the documentation to verify if this is still true.

            if ($] > 5.008) {
              require Encode;
              $val = Encode::encode("UTF-8", $val); # make octets

            }

       o  A scalar we got back from an extension

          If you believe the scalar comes back as UTF-8, you will most likely
          want the UTF8 flag restored:

            if ($] > 5.008) {
              require Encode;
              $val = Encode::decode("UTF-8", $val);
            }

       o  Same thing, if you are really sure it is UTF-8

            if ($] > 5.008) {
              require Encode;
              Encode::_utf8_on($val);
            }

       o  A wrapper for DBI "fetchrow_array" and "fetchrow_hashref"

          When the database contains only UTF-8, a wrapper function or method
          is a convenient way to replace all your "fetchrow_array" and
          "fetchrow_hashref" calls. A wrapper function will also make it
          easier to adapt to future enhancements in your database driver. Note
          that at the time of this writing (January 2012), the DBI has no
          standardized way to deal with UTF-8 data. Please check the DBI
          documentation to verify if that is still true.

            sub fetchrow {
              # $what is one of fetchrow_{array,hashref}
              my($self, $sth, $what) = @_;
              if ($] < 5.008) {
                return $sth->$what;
              } else {
                require Encode;
                if (wantarray) {
                  my @arr = $sth->$what;
                  for (@arr) {
                    defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_);
                  }
                  return @arr;
                } else {
                  my $ret = $sth->$what;
                  if (ref $ret) {
                    for my $k (keys %$ret) {
                      defined
                      && /[^\000-\177]/
                      && Encode::_utf8_on($_) for $ret->{$k};
                    }
                    return $ret;
                  } else {
                    defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_) for $ret;
                    return $ret;
                  }
                }
              }
            }

       o  A large scalar that you know can only contain ASCII

          Scalars that contain only ASCII and are marked as UTF-8 are
          sometimes a drag to your program. If you recognize such a situation,
          just remove the UTF8 flag:

            utf8::downgrade($val) if $] > 5.008;

BUGS
       See also "The "Unicode Bug"" above.

   Interaction with Extensions
       When Perl exchanges data with an extension, the extension should be
       able to understand the UTF8 flag and act accordingly. If the extension
       doesn't recognize that flag, it's likely that the extension will return
       incorrectly-flagged data.

       So if you're working with Unicode data, consult the documentation of
       every module you're using if there are any issues with Unicode data
       exchange. If the documentation does not talk about Unicode at all,
       suspect the worst and probably look at the source to learn how the
       module is implemented. Modules written completely in Perl shouldn't
       cause problems. Modules that directly or indirectly access code written
       in other programming languages are at risk.

       For affected functions, the simple strategy to avoid data corruption is
       to always make the encoding of the exchanged data explicit. Choose an
       encoding that you know the extension can handle. Convert arguments
       passed to the extensions to that encoding and convert results back from
       that encoding. Write wrapper functions that do the conversions for you,
       so you can later change the functions when the extension catches up.

       To provide an example, let's say the popular "Foo::Bar::escape_html"
       function doesn't deal with Unicode data yet. The wrapper function would
       convert the argument to raw UTF-8 and convert the result back to Perl's
       internal representation like so:

           sub my_escape_html ($) {
               my($what) = shift;
               return unless defined $what;
               Encode::decode("UTF-8", Foo::Bar::escape_html(
                                            Encode::encode("UTF-8", $what)));
           }

       Sometimes, when the extension does not convert data but just stores and
       retrieves it, you will be able to use the otherwise dangerous
       "Encode::_utf8_on()" function. Let's say the popular "Foo::Bar"
       extension, written in C, provides a "param" method that lets you store
       and retrieve data according to these prototypes:

           $self->param($name, $value);            # set a scalar
           $value = $self->param($name);           # retrieve a scalar

       If it does not yet provide support for any encoding, one could write a
       derived class with such a "param" method:

           sub param {
             my($self,$name,$value) = @_;
             utf8::upgrade($name);     # make sure it is UTF-8 encoded
             if (defined $value) {
               utf8::upgrade($value);  # make sure it is UTF-8 encoded
               return $self->SUPER::param($name,$value);
             } else {
               my $ret = $self->SUPER::param($name);
               Encode::_utf8_on($ret); # we know, it is UTF-8 encoded
               return $ret;
             }
           }

       Some extensions provide filters on data entry/exit points, such as
       "DB_File::filter_store_key" and family. Look out for such filters in
       the documentation of your extensions; they can make the transition to
       Unicode data much easier.

   Speed
       Some functions are slower when working on UTF-8 encoded strings than on
       byte encoded strings.  All functions that need to hop over characters
       such as "length()", "substr()" or "index()", or matching regular
       expressions can work much faster when the underlying data are byte-
       encoded.

       In Perl 5.8.0 the slowness was often quite spectacular; in Perl 5.8.1 a
       caching scheme was introduced which improved the situation.  In
       general, operations with UTF-8 encoded strings are still slower. As an
       example, the Unicode properties (character classes) like "\p{Nd}" are
       known to be quite a bit slower (5-20 times) than their simpler
       counterparts like "[0-9]" (then again, there are hundreds of Unicode
       characters matching "Nd" compared with the 10 ASCII characters matching
       "[0-9]").

SEE ALSO
       perlunitut, perluniintro, perluniprops, Encode, open, utf8, bytes,
       perlretut, "${^UNICODE}" in perlvar,
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>).

perl v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                    PERLUNICODE(1)
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