These are experimental modules to handle various Unicode issues.  They
were made before perl included native UTF8 support.

More information on what Unicode is and can do for you are to be found
at http://www.unicode.org

The current set of modules are:

  Unicode::String   - represent strings of Unicode chars
  Unicode::CharName - look up character names
  Unicode::Map8     - mapping tables towards 8-bit char sets

(the Unicode::Map8 module is distributed separately)


Some of ideas to investigate for the Unicode modules are:

   o Depreciation because of perl's own utf8 support.

   o Composition/decomposition support:
     $u->decomp;  # will decomposite as much as possible:  "å"  --> "a°"
     $u->comp;    # will composite as much as possible:    "a°" --> "å"

     Need separate routines or a special argument to distinguish
     between compatibility decomposition and canonical decomposition.
     The last one is a subset of the first one.

   o General Unicode string to number convertion (based on unidata
     number attributes)

   o Case convertions (lc, uc, ucfirst)  last one should use title-case

   o Fast lookup of Unicode attributes (unidata lookup using XS)
     $u->isletter, $u->isupper, $u->islower,....  why do we need them when
     perl does not need them for normal text??

   o There might be some support for the private area (i.e. adding case
     convertion and char properties to chars within the area).

   o Unicode tr-function, sprintf-function

   o Unicode string comparison functions: cmp(), le, eq,...

   o Unicode regular expressions: m// s/// split(//,..)

   o Unicode filehandles (automatic convertion from UTF-7/UTF-8/8-bit 
     char set when reading,writing to filehandles)

   o Fast convertion to other large char sets (east-asien).  I don't
     know anything about this.


EXAMPLES

The following are examples of use of the current modules:

   use Unicode::String qw(latin1 utf8);

   $u = utf8("this is a string\n");
   print $u->ucs4;
   print $u->utf16;
   print $u->utf8;
   print $u->utf7;
   print $u->latin1;
   print $u->hex;

   print latin1("naïve\n")->utf8;

   use Unicode::CharName qw(uname);
   print uname(ord('$')), "\n";



COPYRIGHT

  © 1997-2000,2005 Gisle Aas. All rights reserved.

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