NAME

Unicode::Semantics - Work around *the* Perl 5 Unicode bug

SYNOPSIS

    $foo;      # could be anything
    us($foo):  # force Unicode semantics

or:

    us($foo) =~ s/\W/_/g;  # Upgrade and use immediately

DESCRIPTION

Perl uses Unicode semantics when the internal encoding for a string is UTF-8, but it uses ASCII semantics when the internal encoding is ISO-8859-1. This means that the non-ASCII part of the character set is ignored when for the following operations:

    * uc, lc, ucfirst, lcfirst, \U, \L, \u, \l
    * \d, \s, \w, \D, \S, \W
    * /.../i, (?i:...)
    * /[[:posix:]]/

Because you shouldn't (and often don't) know what the internal encoding will be, it's hard to predict whether these operations will actually do what you want. Unicode::Semantics::us() gives you predictable results.

This module exports us that upgrades your string to UTF-8 internally and returns the string.

You can also use utf8::upgrade, which does exactly the same thing, except that it does not return the string. This module was released because it's less typing in a large program :)

BINARY STRINGS

Obviously, these broken text operations are no problem when you're dealing with bytes instead of characters. Don't upgrade your binary strings!

AUTHOR

Juerd Waalboer <#####@juerd.nl>

SEE ALSO

perlunitut, perlunifaq