Encode - character encodings
use Encode;
Encode consists of a collection of modules whose details are too big to fit in one document. This POD itself explains the top-level APIs and general topics at a glance. For other topics and more details, see the PODs below:
Name Description -------------------------------------------------------- Encode::Alias Alias definitions to encodings Encode::Encoding Encode Implementation Base Class Encode::Supported List of Supported Encodings Encode::CN Simplified Chinese Encodings Encode::JP Japanese Encodings Encode::KR Korean Encodings Encode::TW Traditional Chinese Encodings --------------------------------------------------------
The Encode module provides the interfaces between Perl's strings
and the rest of the system. Perl strings are sequences of
characters.
The repertoire of characters that Perl can represent is at least that
defined by the Unicode Consortium. On most platforms the ordinal
values of the characters (as returned by ord(ch)) is the "Unicode
codepoint" for the character (the exceptions are those platforms where
the legacy encoding is some variant of EBCDIC rather than a super-set
of ASCII - see perlebcdic).
Traditionally, computer data has been moved around in 8-bit chunks often called "bytes". These chunks are also known as "octets" in networking standards. Perl is widely used to manipulate data of many types - not only strings of characters representing human or computer languages but also "binary" data being the machine's representation of numbers, pixels in an image - or just about anything.
When Perl is processing "binary data", the programmer wants Perl to process "sequences of bytes". This is not a problem for Perl - as a byte has 256 possible values, it easily fits in Perl's much larger "logical character".
Encodes a string from Perl's internal form into ENCODING and returns a sequence of octets. ENCODING can be either a canonical name or an alias. For encoding names and aliases, see /"Defining Aliases". For CHECK, see /"Handling Malformed Data".
For example, to convert a string from Perl's internal format to iso-8859-1 (also known as Latin1),
$octets = encode("iso-8859-1", $string);
CAVEAT: When you run $octets = encode("utf8", $string), then $octets
may not be equal to $string. Though they both contain the same data, the utf8 flag
for $octets is always off. When you encode anything, utf8 flag of
the result is always off, even when it contains completely valid utf8
string. See /"The UTF-8 flag" below.
encode($valid_encoding, undef) is harmless but warns you for
Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry.
encode($valid_encoding, '') is harmless and warnless.
Decodes a sequence of octets assumed to be in ENCODING into Perl's internal form and returns the resulting string. As in encode(), ENCODING can be either a canonical name or an alias. For encoding names and aliases, see /"Defining Aliases". For CHECK, see /"Handling Malformed Data".
For example, to convert ISO-8859-1 data to a string in Perl's internal format:
$string = decode("iso-8859-1", $octets);
CAVEAT: When you run $string = decode("utf8", $octets), then $string
may not be equal to $octets. Though they both contain the same data,
the utf8 flag for $string is on unless $octets entirely consists of
ASCII data (or EBCDIC on EBCDIC machines). See /"The UTF-8 flag"
below.
decode($valid_encoding, undef) is harmless but warns you for
Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry.
decode($valid_encoding, '') is harmless and warnless.
Converts in-place data between two encodings. The data in $octets must be encoded as octets and not as characters in Perl's internal format. For example, to convert ISO-8859-1 data to Microsoft's CP1250 encoding:
from_to($octets, "iso-8859-1", "cp1250");
and to convert it back:
from_to($octets, "cp1250", "iso-8859-1");
Note that because the conversion happens in place, the data to be converted cannot be a string constant; it must be a scalar variable.
from_to() returns the length of the converted string in octets on success, undef otherwise.
CAVEAT: The following operations look the same but are not quite so;
from_to($data, "iso-8859-1", "utf8"); #1
$data = decode("iso-8859-1", $data); #2
Both #1 and #2 make $data consist of a completely valid UTF-8 string but only #2 turns utf8 flag on. #1 is equivalent to
$data = encode("utf8", decode("iso-8859-1", $data));
See /"The UTF-8 flag" below.
$octets = encode("utf8", $string); The characters
that comprise $string are encoded in Perl's internal format and the
result is returned as a sequence of octets. All possible
characters have a UTF-8 representation so this function cannot fail.
$string = decode("utf8", $octets [, CHECK]).
The sequence of octets represented by
$octets is decoded from UTF-8 into a sequence of logical
characters. Not all sequences of octets form valid UTF-8 encodings, so
it is possible for this call to fail. For CHECK, see
/"Handling Malformed Data".
use Encode; @list = Encode->encodings();
Returns a list of the canonical names of the available encodings that are loaded. To get a list of all available encodings including the ones that are not loaded yet, say
@all_encodings = Encode->encodings(":all");
Or you can give the name of a specific module.
@with_jp = Encode->encodings("Encode::JP");
When "::" is not in the name, "Encode::" is assumed.
@ebcdic = Encode->encodings("EBCDIC");
To find out in detail which encodings are supported by this package, see Encode::Supported.
To add a new alias to a given encoding, use:
use Encode; use Encode::Alias; define_alias(newName => ENCODING);
After that, newName can be used as an alias for ENCODING. ENCODING may be either the name of an encoding or an encoding object
But before you do so, make sure the alias is nonexistent with
resolve_alias(), which returns the canonical name thereof.
i.e.
Encode::resolve_alias("latin1") eq "iso-8859-1" # true
Encode::resolve_alias("iso-8859-12") # false; nonexistent
Encode::resolve_alias($name) eq $name # true if $name is canonical
resolve_alias() does not need use Encode::Alias; it can be
exported via use Encode qw(resolve_alias).
See Encode::Alias for details.
If your perl supports PerlIO (which is the default), you can use a PerlIO layer to decode and encode directly via a filehandle. The following two examples are totally identical in their functionality.
# via PerlIO
open my $in, "<:encoding(shiftjis)", $infile or die;
open my $out, ">:encoding(euc-jp)", $outfile or die;
while(<$in>){ print $out $_; }
# via from_to
open my $in, "<", $infile or die;
open my $out, ">", $outfile or die;
while(<$in>){
from_to($_, "shiftjis", "euc-jp", 1);
print $out $_;
}
Unfortunately, it may be that encodings are PerlIO-savvy. You can check
if your encoding is supported by PerlIO by calling the perlio_ok
method.
Encode::perlio_ok("hz"); # False
find_encoding("euc-cn")->perlio_ok; # True where PerlIO is available
use Encode qw(perlio_ok); # exported upon request
perlio_ok("euc-jp")
Fortunately, all encodings that come with Encode core are PerlIO-savvy except for hz and ISO-2022-kr. For gory details, see Encode::Encoding and Encode::PerlIO.
The CHECK argument is used as follows. When you omit it, the behaviour is the same as if you had passed a value of 0 for CHECK.
0xFFFD is used.
If the data is supposed to be UTF-8, an optional lexical warning
(category utf8) is given.
If CHECK is set to Encode::FB_QUIET, (en|de)code will immediately return the portion of the data that has been processed so far when an error occurs. The data argument will be overwritten with everything after that point (that is, the unprocessed part of data). This is handy when you have to call decode repeatedly in the case where your source data may contain partial multi-byte character sequences, for example because you are reading with a fixed-width buffer. Here is some sample code that does exactly this:
my $data = ''; my $utf8 = '';
while(defined(read $fh, $buffer, 256)){
# buffer may end in a partial character so we append
$data .= $buffer;
$utf8 .= decode($encoding, $data, Encode::FB_QUIET);
# $data now contains the unprocessed partial character
}
For encodings that are implemented by Encode::XS, CHECK ==
Encode::FB_PERLQQ turns (en|de)code into perlqq fallback mode.
When you decode, \xHH will be inserted for a malformed character,
where HH is the hex representation of the octet that could not be
decoded to utf8. And when you encode, \x{HHHH} will be inserted,
where HHHH is the Unicode ID of the character that cannot be found
in the character repertoire of the encoding.
HTML/XML character reference modes are about the same, in place of
\x{HHHH}, HTML uses &#NNNN; where NNNN is a decimal digit and
XML uses &#xHHHH; where HHHH is the hexadecimal digit.
These modes are actually set via a bitmask. Here is how the FB_XX
constants are laid out. You can import the FB_XX constants via
use Encode qw(:fallbacks); you can import the generic bitmask
constants via use Encode qw(:fallback_all).
FB_DEFAULT FB_CROAK FB_QUIET FB_WARN FB_PERLQQ DIE_ON_ERR 0x0001 X WARN_ON_ERR 0x0002 X RETURN_ON_ERR 0x0004 X X LEAVE_SRC 0x0008 PERLQQ 0x0100 X HTMLCREF 0x0200 XMLCREF 0x0400
In the future, you will be able to use a code reference to a callback function for the value of CHECK but its API is still undecided.
The fallback scheme does not work on EBCDIC platforms.
To define a new encoding, use:
use Encode qw(define_encoding);
define_encoding($object, 'canonicalName' [, alias...]);
canonicalName will be associated with $object. The object should provide the interface described in Encode::Encoding. If more than two arguments are provided then additional arguments are taken as aliases for $object.
See Encode::Encoding for more details.
Before the introduction of utf8 support in perl, The eq operator
just compared the strings represented by two scalars. Beginning with
perl 5.8, eq compares two strings with simultaneous consideration
of the utf8 flag. To explain why we made it so, I will quote page
402 of Programming Perl, 3rd ed.
Back when Programming Perl, 3rd ed. was written, not even Perl 5.6.0
was born and many features documented in the book remained
unimplemented for a long time. Perl 5.8 corrected this and the introduction
of the UTF-8 flag is one of them. You can think of this perl notion as of a
byte-oriented mode (utf8 flag off) and a character-oriented mode (utf8
flag on).
Here is how Encode takes care of the utf8 flag.
When you decode, the resulting utf8 flag is on unless you can unambiguously represent data. Here is the definition of dis-ambiguity.
After $utf8 = decode('foo', $octet);,
When $octet is... The utf8 flag in $utf8 is --------------------------------------------- In ASCII only (or EBCDIC only) OFF In ISO-8859-1 ON In any other Encoding ON ---------------------------------------------
As you see, there is one exception, In ASCII. That way you can assue Goal #1. And with Encode Goal #2 is assumed but you still have to be careful in such cases mentioned in CAVEAT paragraphs.
This utf8 flag is not visible in perl scripts, exactly for the same reason you cannot (or you don't have to) see if a scalar contains a string, integer, or floating point number. But you can still peek and poke these if you will. See the section below.
The following API uses parts of Perl's internals in the current implementation. As such, they are efficient but may change.
undef if STRING is not a string.
undef if STRING is
not a string.
Encode::Encoding, Encode::Supported, Encode::PerlIO, encoding, perlebcdic, perlfunc/open, perlunicode, utf8, the Perl Unicode Mailing List <perl-unicode@perl.org>
This project was originated by Nick Ing-Simmons and later maintained by Dan Kogai <dankogai@dan.co.jp>. See AUTHORS for a full list of people involved. For any questions, use <perl-unicode@perl.org> so we can all share.