xref: /openbsd-src/gnu/usr.bin/perl/lib/utf8.pm (revision 9f11ffb7133c203312a01e4b986886bc88c7d74b)
1package utf8;
2
3$utf8::hint_bits = 0x00800000;
4
5our $VERSION = '1.21';
6
7sub import {
8    $^H |= $utf8::hint_bits;
9}
10
11sub unimport {
12    $^H &= ~$utf8::hint_bits;
13}
14
15sub AUTOLOAD {
16    require "utf8_heavy.pl";
17    goto &$AUTOLOAD if defined &$AUTOLOAD;
18    require Carp;
19    Carp::croak("Undefined subroutine $AUTOLOAD called");
20}
21
221;
23__END__
24
25=head1 NAME
26
27utf8 - Perl pragma to enable/disable UTF-8 (or UTF-EBCDIC) in source code
28
29=head1 SYNOPSIS
30
31 use utf8;
32 no utf8;
33
34 # Convert the internal representation of a Perl scalar to/from UTF-8.
35
36 $num_octets = utf8::upgrade($string);
37 $success    = utf8::downgrade($string[, $fail_ok]);
38
39 # Change each character of a Perl scalar to/from a series of
40 # characters that represent the UTF-8 bytes of each original character.
41
42 utf8::encode($string);  # "\x{100}"  becomes "\xc4\x80"
43 utf8::decode($string);  # "\xc4\x80" becomes "\x{100}"
44
45 # Convert a code point from the platform native character set to
46 # Unicode, and vice-versa.
47 $unicode = utf8::native_to_unicode(ord('A')); # returns 65 on both
48                                               # ASCII and EBCDIC
49                                               # platforms
50 $native = utf8::unicode_to_native(65);        # returns 65 on ASCII
51                                               # platforms; 193 on
52                                               # EBCDIC
53
54 $flag = utf8::is_utf8($string); # since Perl 5.8.1
55 $flag = utf8::valid($string);
56
57=head1 DESCRIPTION
58
59The C<use utf8> pragma tells the Perl parser to allow UTF-8 in the
60program text in the current lexical scope.  The C<no utf8> pragma tells Perl
61to switch back to treating the source text as literal bytes in the current
62lexical scope.  (On EBCDIC platforms, technically it is allowing UTF-EBCDIC,
63and not UTF-8, but this distinction is academic, so in this document the term
64UTF-8 is used to mean both).
65
66B<Do not use this pragma for anything else than telling Perl that your
67script is written in UTF-8.> The utility functions described below are
68directly usable without C<use utf8;>.
69
70Because it is not possible to reliably tell UTF-8 from native 8 bit
71encodings, you need either a Byte Order Mark at the beginning of your
72source code, or C<use utf8;>, to instruct perl.
73
74When UTF-8 becomes the standard source format, this pragma will
75effectively become a no-op.
76
77See also the effects of the C<-C> switch and its cousin, the
78C<PERL_UNICODE> environment variable, in L<perlrun>.
79
80Enabling the C<utf8> pragma has the following effect:
81
82=over 4
83
84=item *
85
86Bytes in the source text that are not in the ASCII character set will be
87treated as being part of a literal UTF-8 sequence.  This includes most
88literals such as identifier names, string constants, and constant
89regular expression patterns.
90
91=back
92
93Note that if you have non-ASCII, non-UTF-8 bytes in your script (for example
94embedded Latin-1 in your string literals), C<use utf8> will be unhappy.  If
95you want to have such bytes under C<use utf8>, you can disable this pragma
96until the end the block (or file, if at top level) by C<no utf8;>.
97
98=head2 Utility functions
99
100The following functions are defined in the C<utf8::> package by the
101Perl core.  You do not need to say C<use utf8> to use these and in fact
102you should not say that unless you really want to have UTF-8 source code.
103
104=over 4
105
106=item * C<$num_octets = utf8::upgrade($string)>
107
108(Since Perl v5.8.0)
109Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from an octet
110sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC) to UTF-8. The
111logical character sequence itself is unchanged.  If I<$string> is already
112upgraded, then this is a no-op. Returns the
113number of octets necessary to represent the string as UTF-8.
114
115If your code needs to be compatible with versions of perl without
116C<use feature 'unicode_strings';>, you can force Unicode semantics on
117a given string:
118
119  # force unicode semantics for $string without the
120  # "unicode_strings" feature
121  utf8::upgrade($string);
122
123For example:
124
125  # without explicit or implicit use feature 'unicode_strings'
126  my $x = "\xDF";    # LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S
127  $x =~ /ss/i;       # won't match
128  my $y = uc($x);    # won't convert
129  utf8::upgrade($x);
130  $x =~ /ss/i;       # matches
131  my $z = uc($x);    # converts to "SS"
132
133B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
134use L<Encode> instead.
135
136=item * C<$success = utf8::downgrade($string[, $fail_ok])>
137
138(Since Perl v5.8.0)
139Converts in-place the internal representation of the string from UTF-8 to the
140equivalent octet sequence in the native encoding (Latin-1 or EBCDIC). The
141logical character sequence itself is unchanged. If I<$string> is already
142stored as native 8 bit, then this is a no-op.  Can be used to make sure that
143the UTF-8 flag is off, e.g. when you want to make sure that the substr() or
144length() function works with the usually faster byte algorithm.
145
146Fails if the original UTF-8 sequence cannot be represented in the
147native 8 bit encoding. On failure dies or, if the value of I<$fail_ok> is
148true, returns false.
149
150Returns true on success.
151
152If your code expects an octet sequence this can be used to validate
153that you've received one:
154
155  # throw an exception if not representable as octets
156  utf8::downgrade($string)
157
158  # or do your own error handling
159  utf8::downgrade($string, 1) or die "string must be octets";
160
161B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
162use L<Encode> instead.
163
164=item * C<utf8::encode($string)>
165
166(Since Perl v5.8.0)
167Converts in-place the character sequence to the corresponding octet
168sequence in Perl's extended UTF-8. That is, every (possibly wide) character
169gets replaced with a sequence of one or more characters that represent the
170individual UTF-8 bytes of the character.  The UTF8 flag is turned off.
171Returns nothing.
172
173 my $x = "\x{100}"; # $x contains one character, with ord 0x100
174 utf8::encode($x);  # $x contains two characters, with ords (on
175                    # ASCII platforms) 0xc4 and 0x80.  On EBCDIC
176                    # 1047, this would instead be 0x8C and 0x41.
177
178Similar to:
179
180  use Encode;
181  $x = Encode::encode("utf8", $x);
182
183B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
184use L<Encode> instead.
185
186=item * C<$success = utf8::decode($string)>
187
188(Since Perl v5.8.0)
189Attempts to convert in-place the octet sequence encoded in Perl's extended
190UTF-8 to the corresponding character sequence. That is, it replaces each
191sequence of characters in the string whose ords represent a valid (extended)
192UTF-8 byte sequence, with the corresponding single character.  The UTF-8 flag
193is turned on only if the source string contains multiple-byte UTF-8
194characters.  If I<$string> is invalid as extended UTF-8, returns false;
195otherwise returns true.
196
197 my $x = "\xc4\x80"; # $x contains two characters, with ords
198                     # 0xc4 and 0x80
199 utf8::decode($x);   # On ASCII platforms, $x contains one char,
200                     # with ord 0x100.   Since these bytes aren't
201                     # legal UTF-EBCDIC, on EBCDIC platforms, $x is
202                     # unchanged and the function returns FALSE.
203
204B<Note that this function does not handle arbitrary encodings>;
205use L<Encode> instead.
206
207=item * C<$unicode = utf8::native_to_unicode($code_point)>
208
209(Since Perl v5.8.0)
210This takes an unsigned integer (which represents the ordinal number of a
211character (or a code point) on the platform the program is being run on) and
212returns its Unicode equivalent value.  Since ASCII platforms natively use the
213Unicode code points, this function returns its input on them.  On EBCDIC
214platforms it converts from EBCDIC to Unicode.
215
216A meaningless value will currently be returned if the input is not an unsigned
217integer.
218
219Since Perl v5.22.0, calls to this function are optimized out on ASCII
220platforms, so there is no performance hit in using it there.
221
222=item * C<$native = utf8::unicode_to_native($code_point)>
223
224(Since Perl v5.8.0)
225This is the inverse of C<utf8::native_to_unicode()>, converting the other
226direction.  Again, on ASCII platforms, this returns its input, but on EBCDIC
227platforms it will find the native platform code point, given any Unicode one.
228
229A meaningless value will currently be returned if the input is not an unsigned
230integer.
231
232Since Perl v5.22.0, calls to this function are optimized out on ASCII
233platforms, so there is no performance hit in using it there.
234
235=item * C<$flag = utf8::is_utf8($string)>
236
237(Since Perl 5.8.1)  Test whether I<$string> is marked internally as encoded in
238UTF-8.  Functionally the same as C<Encode::is_utf8($string)>.
239
240Typically only necessary for debugging and testing, if you need to
241dump the internals of an SV, L<Devel::Peek's|Devel::Peek> Dump()
242provides more detail in a compact form.
243
244If you still think you need this outside of debugging, testing or
245dealing with filenames, you should probably read L<perlunitut> and
246L<perlunifaq/What is "the UTF8 flag"?>.
247
248Don't use this flag as a marker to distinguish character and binary
249data: that should be decided for each variable when you write your
250code.
251
252To force unicode semantics in code portable to perl 5.8 and 5.10, call
253C<utf8::upgrade($string)> unconditionally.
254
255=item * C<$flag = utf8::valid($string)>
256
257[INTERNAL] Test whether I<$string> is in a consistent state regarding
258UTF-8.  Will return true if it is well-formed Perl extended UTF-8 and has the
259UTF-8 flag
260on B<or> if I<$string> is held as bytes (both these states are 'consistent').
261The main reason for this routine is to allow Perl's test suite to check
262that operations have left strings in a consistent state.
263
264=back
265
266C<utf8::encode> is like C<utf8::upgrade>, but the UTF8 flag is
267cleared.  See L<perlunicode>, and the C API
268functions C<L<sv_utf8_upgrade|perlapi/sv_utf8_upgrade>>,
269C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_downgrade>>, C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_encode>>,
270and C<L<perlapi/sv_utf8_decode>>, which are wrapped by the Perl functions
271C<utf8::upgrade>, C<utf8::downgrade>, C<utf8::encode> and
272C<utf8::decode>.  Also, the functions C<utf8::is_utf8>, C<utf8::valid>,
273C<utf8::encode>, C<utf8::decode>, C<utf8::upgrade>, and C<utf8::downgrade> are
274actually internal, and thus always available, without a C<require utf8>
275statement.
276
277=head1 BUGS
278
279Some filesystems may not support UTF-8 file names, or they may be supported
280incompatibly with Perl.  Therefore UTF-8 names that are visible to the
281filesystem, such as module names may not work.
282
283=head1 SEE ALSO
284
285L<perlunitut>, L<perluniintro>, L<perlrun>, L<bytes>, L<perlunicode>
286
287=cut
288