NAME

       Locale::Recode - Object-Oriented Portable Charset Conversion

SYNOPSIS

         use Locale::Recode;

         $cd = Locale::Recode->new (from => 'UTF-8',
                                    to   => 'ISO-8859-1');

         die $cd->getError if $cd->getError;

         $cd->recode ($text) or die $cd->getError;

         $mime_name = Locale::Recode->resolveAlias ('latin-1');

         $supported = Locale::Recode->getSupported;

         $complete = Locale::Recode->getCharsets;

DESCRIPTION

       This module provides routines that convert textual data from one codeset to another in a portable way.
       The module has been started before Encode(3) was written.  It's main purpose today is to provide charset
       conversion even when Encode(3) is not available on the system.  It should also work for older Perl
       versions without Unicode support.

       Internally Locale::Recode(3) will use Encode(3) whenever possible, to allow for a faster conversion and
       for a wider range of supported charsets, and will only fall back to the Perl implementation when
       Encode(3) is not available or does not support a particular charset that Locale::Recode(3) does.

       Locale::Recode(3) is part of libintl-perl, and it's main purpose is actually to implement a portable
       charset conversion framework for the message translation facilities described in Locale::TextDomain(3).

CONSTRUCTOR

       The constructor "new()" requires two named arguments:

       from
           The encoding of the original data.  Case doesn't matter, aliases are resolved.

       to  The target encoding.  Again, case doesn't matter, and aliases are resolved.

       The  constructor  will never fail.  In case of an error, the object's internal state is set to bad and it
       will refuse to do any conversions.   You  can  inquire  the  reason  for  the  failure  with  the  method
       getError().

OBJECT METHODS

       The following object methods are available.

       recode (STRING)
           Converts  STRING from the source encoding into the destination encoding.  In case of success, a truth
           value is returned, false otherwise.  You can inquire the reason  for  the  failure  with  the  method
           getError().

       getError
           Returns either false if the object is not in an error state or an error message.

CLASS METHODS

       The object provides some additional class methods:

       getSupported
           Returns  a  reference  to  a  list  of  all supported charsets.  This may implicitely load additional
           Encode(3) conversions like Encode::HanExtra(3) which may produce considerable load on your system.

           The method is therefore not intended for regular use but rather for getting resp. displaying  once  a
           list of available encodings.

           The members of the list are all converted to uppercase!

       getCharsets
           Like getSupported() but also returns all available aliases.

SUPPORTED CHARSETS

       The  range of supported charsets is system-dependent.  The following somewhat special charsets are always
       available:

       UTF-8
           UTF-8 is available independently of your Perl version.  For Perl 5.6 or better or in the presence  of
           Encode(3),  conversions  are  not  done  in Perl but with the interfaces provided by these facilities
           which are written in C, hence much faster.

           Encoding data into UTF-8 is fast, even if it is done in Perl.  Decoding it in Perl may  become  quite
           slow.  If you frequently have to decode UTF-8 with Locale::Recode you will probably want to make sure
           that you do that with Perl 5.6 or beter, or install Encode(3) to speed up things.

       INTERNAL
           UTF-8 is fast to write but hard to read for applications.  It is therefore not the worst for internal
           string  representation  but  not  far  from  that.   Locale::Recode(3) stores strings internally as a
           reference to an array of integer values like most programming languages (Perl is  an  exception)  do,
           trading memory for performance.

           The integer values are the UCS-4 codes of the characters in host byte order.

           The  encoding INTERNAL is directly availabe via Locale::Recode(3) but of course you should not really
           use it for data exchange, unless you know what you are doing.

       Locale::Recode(3) has native support for a plethora of other encodings, most of them 8 bit encodings that
       are fast to decode, including most encodings used  on  popular  micros  like  the  ISO-8859-*  series  of
       encodings, most Windows-* encodings (also known as CP*), Macintosh, Atari, etc.

NAMES AND ALIASES

       Each  charset  resp.  encoding is available internally under a unique name.  Whenever the information was
       available, the preferred MIME name (see <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/>) was chosen  as
       the internal name.

       Alias  handling  is  quite  strict.   The module does not make wild guesses at what you mean ("What's the
       meaning of the acronym JIS" is a valid alias for "7bit-jis" in Encode(3)  ....)  but  aims  at  providing
       common  aliases  only.   The  same applies to so-called aliases that are really mistakes, like "utf8" for
       UTF-8.

       The  module  knows   all   aliases   that   are   listed   with   the   IANA   character   set   registry
       (<http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/>),  plus  those  known  to  libiconv version 1.8, and a
       bunch of additional ones.

CONVERSION TABLES

       The conversion tables have either been  taken  from  official  sources  like  the  IANA  or  the  Unicode
       Consortium,  from  Bruno  Haible's libiconv, or from the sources of the GNU libc and the regression tests
       for libintl-perl will check for conformance here.  For some encodings this data differs from  Encode(3)'s
       data  which  would  cause  these tests to fail.  In these cases, the module will not invoke the Encode(3)
       methods, but will fall back to the internal implementation for the sake of consistency.

       The few encodings that are affected are so simple that you  will  not  experience  any  real  performance
       penalty  unless  you  convert  large chunks of data.  But the package is not really intended for such use
       anyway, and since Encode(3) is relatively new, I rather think that the differences  are  bugs  in  Encode
       which will be fixed soon.

BUGS

       The  module  should  provide  fall  back conversions for other Unicode encoding schemes like UCS-2, UCS-4
       (big- and little-endian).

       The pure Perl UTF-8 decoder will not always handle corrupt UTF-8 correctly, especially at the end and  at
       the beginning of the string.  This is not likely to be fixed, since the module's intention is not to be a
       consistency checker for UTF-8 data.

AUTHOR

       Copyright  (C)  2002-2015,  Guido  Flohr <guido.flohr@cantanea.com>, all rights reserved.  See the source
       code for details.

SEE ALSO

       Encode(3), iconv(3), iconv(1), recode(1), perl(1)

POD ERRORS

       Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:

       Around line 364:
           =cut found outside a pod block.  Skipping to next block.

perl v5.22.1                                       2015-04-03                                Locale::Recode(3pm)