.\" Automatically generated by Pod::Man 4.14 (Pod::Simple 3.43) .\" .\" Standard preamble: .\" ======================================================================== .de Sp \" Vertical space (when we can't use .PP) .if t .sp .5v .if n .sp .. .de Vb \" Begin verbatim text .ft CW .nf .ne \\$1 .. .de Ve \" End verbatim text .ft R .fi .. .\" Set up some character translations and predefined strings. \*(-- will .\" give an unbreakable dash, \*(PI will give pi, \*(L" will give a left .\" double quote, and \*(R" will give a right double quote. \*(C+ will .\" give a nicer C++. Capital omega is used to do unbreakable dashes and .\" therefore won't be available. \*(C` and \*(C' expand to `' in nroff, .\" nothing in troff, for use with C<>. .tr \(*W- .ds C+ C\v'-.1v'\h'-1p'\s-2+\h'-1p'+\s0\v'.1v'\h'-1p' .ie n \{\ . ds -- \(*W- . ds PI pi . if (\n(.H=4u)&(1m=24u) .ds -- \(*W\h'-12u'\(*W\h'-12u'-\" diablo 10 pitch . if (\n(.H=4u)&(1m=20u) .ds -- \(*W\h'-12u'\(*W\h'-8u'-\" diablo 12 pitch . ds L" "" . ds R" "" . ds C` "" . ds C' "" 'br\} .el\{\ . ds -- \|\(em\| . ds PI \(*p . ds L" `` . ds R" '' . ds C` . ds C' 'br\} .\" .\" Escape single quotes in literal strings from groff's Unicode transform. .ie \n(.g .ds Aq \(aq .el .ds Aq ' .\" .\" If the F register is >0, we'll generate index entries on stderr for .\" titles (.TH), headers (.SH), subsections (.SS), items (.Ip), and index .\" entries marked with X<> in POD. Of course, you'll have to process the .\" output yourself in some meaningful fashion. .\" .\" Avoid warning from groff about undefined register 'F'. .de IX .. .nr rF 0 .if \n(.g .if rF .nr rF 1 .if (\n(rF:(\n(.g==0)) \{\ . if \nF \{\ . de IX . tm Index:\\$1\t\\n%\t"\\$2" .. . if !\nF==2 \{\ . nr % 0 . nr F 2 . \} . \} .\} .rr rF .\" ======================================================================== .\" .IX Title "Encode::Unicode 3perl" .TH Encode::Unicode 3perl "2023-11-25" "perl v5.36.0" "Perl Programmers Reference Guide" .\" For nroff, turn off justification. Always turn off hyphenation; it makes .\" way too many mistakes in technical documents. .if n .ad l .nh .SH "NAME" Encode::Unicode \-\- Various Unicode Transformation Formats .SH "SYNOPSIS" .IX Header "SYNOPSIS" .Vb 3 \& use Encode qw/encode decode/; \& $ucs2 = encode("UCS\-2BE", $utf8); \& $utf8 = decode("UCS\-2BE", $ucs2); .Ve .SH "ABSTRACT" .IX Header "ABSTRACT" This module implements all Character Encoding Schemes of Unicode that are officially documented by Unicode Consortium (except, of course, for \s-1UTF\-8,\s0 which is a native format in perl). .IP " says:" 4 .IX Item " says:" \&\fICharacter Encoding Scheme\fR A character encoding form plus byte serialization. There are Seven character encoding schemes in Unicode: \&\s-1UTF\-8, UTF\-16, UTF\-16BE, UTF\-16LE, UTF\-32\s0 (\s-1UCS\-4\s0), \s-1UTF\-32BE\s0 (\s-1UCS\-4BE\s0) and \&\s-1UTF\-32LE\s0 (\s-1UCS\-4LE\s0), and \s-1UTF\-7.\s0 .Sp Since \s-1UTF\-7\s0 is a 7\-bit (re)encoded version of \s-1UTF\-16BE,\s0 It is not part of Unicode's Character Encoding Scheme. It is separately implemented in Encode::Unicode::UTF7. For details see Encode::Unicode::UTF7. .IP "Quick Reference" 4 .IX Item "Quick Reference" .Vb 10 \& Decodes from ord(N) Encodes chr(N) to... \& octet/char BOM S.P d800\-dfff ord > 0xffff \ex{1abcd} == \& \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-+\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-+\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- \& UCS\-2BE 2 N N is bogus Not Available \& UCS\-2LE 2 N N bogus Not Available \& UTF\-16 2/4 Y Y is S.P S.P BE/LE \& UTF\-16BE 2/4 N Y S.P S.P 0xd82a,0xdfcd \& UTF\-16LE 2/4 N Y S.P S.P 0x2ad8,0xcddf \& UTF\-32 4 Y \- is bogus As is BE/LE \& UTF\-32BE 4 N \- bogus As is 0x0001abcd \& UTF\-32LE 4 N \- bogus As is 0xcdab0100 \& UTF\-8 1\-4 \- \- bogus >= 4 octets \exf0\ex9a\eaf\e8d \& \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-+\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-+\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- .Ve .SH "Size, Endianness, and BOM" .IX Header "Size, Endianness, and BOM" You can categorize these \s-1CES\s0 by 3 criteria: size of each character, endianness, and Byte Order Mark. .SS "by size" .IX Subsection "by size" \&\s-1UCS\-2\s0 is a fixed-length encoding with each character taking 16 bits. It \fBdoes not\fR support \fIsurrogate pairs\fR. When a surrogate pair is encountered during \fBdecode()\fR, its place is filled with \ex{\s-1FFFD\s0} if \fI\s-1CHECK\s0\fR is 0, or the routine croaks if \fI\s-1CHECK\s0\fR is 1. When a character whose ord value is larger than 0xFFFF is encountered, its place is filled with \ex{\s-1FFFD\s0} if \fI\s-1CHECK\s0\fR is 0, or the routine croaks if \fI\s-1CHECK\s0\fR is 1. .PP \&\s-1UTF\-16\s0 is almost the same as \s-1UCS\-2\s0 but it supports \fIsurrogate pairs\fR. When it encounters a high surrogate (0xD800\-0xDBFF), it fetches the following low surrogate (0xDC00\-0xDFFF) and \f(CW\*(C`desurrogate\*(C'\fRs them to form a character. Bogus surrogates result in death. When \ex{10000} or above is encountered during \fBencode()\fR, it \f(CW\*(C`ensurrogate\*(C'\fRs them and pushes the surrogate pair to the output stream. .PP \&\s-1UTF\-32\s0 (\s-1UCS\-4\s0) is a fixed-length encoding with each character taking 32 bits. Since it is 32\-bit, there is no need for \fIsurrogate pairs\fR. .SS "by endianness" .IX Subsection "by endianness" The first (and now failed) goal of Unicode was to map all character repertoires into a fixed-length integer so that programmers are happy. Since each character is either a \fIshort\fR or \fIlong\fR in C, you have to pay attention to the endianness of each platform when you pass data to one another. .PP Anything marked as \s-1BE\s0 is Big Endian (or network byte order) and \s-1LE\s0 is Little Endian (aka \s-1VAX\s0 byte order). For anything not marked either \&\s-1BE\s0 or \s-1LE,\s0 a character called Byte Order Mark (\s-1BOM\s0) indicating the endianness is prepended to the string. .PP \&\s-1CAVEAT:\s0 Though \s-1BOM\s0 in utf8 (\exEF\exBB\exBF) is valid, it is meaningless and as of this writing Encode suite just leave it as is (\ex{FeFF}). .IP "\s-1BOM\s0 as integer when fetched in network byte order" 4 .IX Item "BOM as integer when fetched in network byte order" .Vb 5 \& 16 32 bits/char \& \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- \& BE 0xFeFF 0x0000FeFF \& LE 0xFFFe 0xFFFe0000 \& \-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\- .Ve .PP This modules handles the \s-1BOM\s0 as follows. .IP "\(bu" 4 When \s-1BE\s0 or \s-1LE\s0 is explicitly stated as the name of encoding, \s-1BOM\s0 is simply treated as a normal character (\s-1ZERO WIDTH\s0 NO-BREAK \s-1SPACE\s0). .IP "\(bu" 4 When \s-1BE\s0 or \s-1LE\s0 is omitted during \fBdecode()\fR, it checks if \s-1BOM\s0 is at the beginning of the string; if one is found, the endianness is set to what the \s-1BOM\s0 says. .IP "\(bu" 4 Default Byte Order .Sp When no \s-1BOM\s0 is found, Encode 2.76 and blow croaked. Since Encode 2.77, it falls back to \s-1BE\s0 accordingly to \s-1RFC2781\s0 and the Unicode Standard version 8.0 .IP "\(bu" 4 When \s-1BE\s0 or \s-1LE\s0 is omitted during \fBencode()\fR, it returns a BE-encoded string with \s-1BOM\s0 prepended. So when you want to encode a whole text file, make sure you \fBencode()\fR the whole text at once, not line by line or each line, not file, will have a \s-1BOM\s0 prepended. .IP "\(bu" 4 \&\f(CW\*(C`UCS\-2\*(C'\fR is an exception. Unlike others, this is an alias of \s-1UCS\-2BE. UCS\-2\s0 is already registered by \s-1IANA\s0 and others that way. .SH "Surrogate Pairs" .IX Header "Surrogate Pairs" To say the least, surrogate pairs were the biggest mistake of the Unicode Consortium. But according to the late Douglas Adams in \fIThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy\fR Trilogy, \f(CW\*(C`In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move\*(C'\fR. Their mistake was not of this magnitude so let's forgive them. .PP (I don't dare make any comparison with Unicode Consortium and the Vogons here ;) Or, comparing Encode to Babel Fish is completely appropriate \*(-- if you can only stick this into your ear :) .PP Surrogate pairs were born when the Unicode Consortium finally admitted that 16 bits were not big enough to hold all the world's character repertoires. But they already made \s-1UCS\-2\s0 16\-bit. What do we do? .PP Back then, the range 0xD800\-0xDFFF was not allocated. Let's split that range in half and use the first half to represent the \f(CW\*(C`upper half of a character\*(C'\fR and the second half to represent the \f(CW\*(C`lower half of a character\*(C'\fR. That way, you can represent 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 more characters. Now we can store character ranges up to \&\ex{10ffff} even with 16\-bit encodings. This pair of half-character is now called a \fIsurrogate pair\fR and \s-1UTF\-16\s0 is the name of the encoding that embraces them. .PP Here is a formula to ensurrogate a Unicode character \ex{10000} and above; .PP .Vb 2 \& $hi = ($uni \- 0x10000) / 0x400 + 0xD800; \& $lo = ($uni \- 0x10000) % 0x400 + 0xDC00; .Ve .PP And to desurrogate; .PP .Vb 1 \& $uni = 0x10000 + ($hi \- 0xD800) * 0x400 + ($lo \- 0xDC00); .Ve .PP Note this move has made \ex{D800}\-\ex{\s-1DFFF\s0} into a forbidden zone but perl does not prohibit the use of characters within this range. To perl, every one of \ex{0000_0000} up to \ex{ffff_ffff} (*) is \fIa character\fR. .PP .Vb 2 \& (*) or \ex{ffff_ffff_ffff_ffff} if your perl is compiled with 64\-bit \& integer support! .Ve .SH "Error Checking" .IX Header "Error Checking" Unlike most encodings which accept various ways to handle errors, Unicode encodings simply croaks. .PP .Vb 6 \& % perl \-MEncode \-e\*(Aq$_ = "\exfe\exff\exd8\exd9\exda\exdb\e0\en"\*(Aq \e \& \-e\*(AqEncode::from_to($_, "utf16","shift_jis", 0); print\*(Aq \& UTF\-16:Malformed LO surrogate d8d9 at /path/to/Encode.pm line 184. \& % perl \-MEncode \-e\*(Aq$a = "BOM missing"\*(Aq \e \& \-e\*(Aq Encode::from_to($a, "utf16", "shift_jis", 0); print\*(Aq \& UTF\-16:Unrecognised BOM 424f at /path/to/Encode.pm line 184. .Ve .PP Unlike other encodings where mappings are not one-to-one against Unicode, UTFs are supposed to map 100% against one another. So Encode is more strict on UTFs. .PP Consider that \*(L"division by zero\*(R" of Encode :) .SH "SEE ALSO" .IX Header "SEE ALSO" Encode, Encode::Unicode::UTF7, , , .PP \&\s-1RFC 2781\s0 , .PP The whole Unicode standard .PP Ch. 6 pp. 275 of \f(CW\*(C`Programming Perl (3rd Edition)\*(C'\fR by Tom Christiansen, brian d foy & Larry Wall; O'Reilly & Associates; \s-1ISBN 978\-0\-596\-00492\-7\s0