Provided by: perl-doc_5.22.1-9ubuntu0.9_all 
NAME
perlunicode - Unicode support in Perl
DESCRIPTION
If you haven't already, before reading this document, you should become familiar with both
perlunitut and perluniintro.
Unicode aims to UNI-fy the en-CODE-ings of all the world's character sets into a single
Standard. For quite a few of the various coding standards that existed when Unicode was
first created, converting from each to Unicode essentially meant adding a constant to each
code point in the original standard, and converting back meant just subtracting that same
constant. For ASCII and ISO-8859-1, the constant is 0. For ISO-8859-5, (Cyrillic) the
constant is 864; for Hebrew (ISO-8859-8), it's 1488; Thai (ISO-8859-11), 3424; and so
forth. This made it easy to do the conversions, and facilitated the adoption of Unicode.
And it worked; nowadays, those legacy standards are rarely used. Most everyone uses
Unicode.
Unicode is a comprehensive standard. It specifies many things outside the scope of Perl,
such as how to display sequences of characters. For a full discussion of all aspects of
Unicode, see <http://www.unicode.org>.
Important Caveats
Even though some of this section may not be understandable to you on first reading, we
think it's important enough to highlight some of the gotchas before delving further, so
here goes:
Unicode support is an extensive requirement. While Perl does not implement the Unicode
standard or the accompanying technical reports from cover to cover, Perl does support many
Unicode features.
Also, the use of Unicode may present security issues that aren't obvious. Read Unicode
Security Considerations <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36>.
Safest if you "use feature 'unicode_strings'"
In order to preserve backward compatibility, Perl does not turn on full internal
Unicode support unless the pragma "use feature 'unicode_strings'" is specified. (This
is automatically selected if you "use 5.012" or higher.) Failure to do this can
trigger unexpected surprises. See "The "Unicode Bug"" below.
This pragma doesn't affect I/O. Nor does it change the internal representation of
strings, only their interpretation. There are still several places where Unicode
isn't fully supported, such as in filenames.
Input and Output Layers
Use the ":encoding(...)" layer to read from and write to filehandles using the
specified encoding. (See open.)
You should convert your non-ASCII, non-UTF-8 Perl scripts to be UTF-8.
See encoding.
"use utf8" still needed to enable UTF-8 in scripts
If your Perl script is itself encoded in UTF-8, the "use utf8" pragma must be
explicitly included to enable recognition of that (in string or regular expression
literals, or in identifier names). This is the only time when an explicit "use utf8"
is needed. (See utf8).
"BOM"-marked scripts and UTF-16 scripts autodetected
However, if a Perl script begins with the Unicode "BOM" (UTF-16LE, UTF16-BE, or
UTF-8), or if the script looks like non-"BOM"-marked UTF-16 of either endianness, Perl
will correctly read in the script as the appropriate Unicode encoding. ("BOM"-less
UTF-8 cannot be effectively recognized or differentiated from ISO 8859-1 or other
eight-bit encodings.)
Byte and Character Semantics
Before Unicode, most encodings used 8 bits (a single byte) to encode each character. Thus
a character was a byte, and a byte was a character, and there could be only 256 or fewer
possible characters. "Byte Semantics" in the title of this section refers to this
behavior. There was no need to distinguish between "Byte" and "Character".
Then along comes Unicode which has room for over a million characters (and Perl allows for
even more). This means that a character may require more than a single byte to represent
it, and so the two terms are no longer equivalent. What matter are the characters as
whole entities, and not usually the bytes that comprise them. That's what the term
"Character Semantics" in the title of this section refers to.
Perl had to change internally to decouple "bytes" from "characters". It is important that
you too change your ideas, if you haven't already, so that "byte" and "character" no
longer mean the same thing in your mind.
The basic building block of Perl strings has always been a "character". The changes
basically come down to that the implementation no longer thinks that a character is always
just a single byte.
There are various things to note:
• String handling functions, for the most part, continue to operate in terms of
characters. "length()", for example, returns the number of characters in a string,
just as before. But that number no longer is necessarily the same as the number of
bytes in the string (there may be more bytes than characters). The other such
functions include "chop()", "chomp()", "substr()", "pos()", "index()", "rindex()",
"sort()", "sprintf()", and "write()".
The exceptions are:
• the bit-oriented "vec"
• the byte-oriented "pack"/"unpack" "C" format
However, the "W" specifier does operate on whole characters, as does the "U"
specifier.
• some operators that interact with the platform's operating system
Operators dealing with filenames are examples.
• when the functions are called from within the scope of the "use bytes" pragma
Likely, you should use this only for debugging anyway.
• Strings--including hash keys--and regular expression patterns may contain characters
that have ordinal values larger than 255.
If you use a Unicode editor to edit your program, Unicode characters may occur
directly within the literal strings in UTF-8 encoding, or UTF-16. (The former
requires a "BOM" or "use utf8", the latter requires a "BOM".)
"Creating Unicode" in perluniintro gives other ways to place non-ASCII characters in
your strings.
• The "chr()" and "ord()" functions work on whole characters.
• Regular expressions match whole characters. For example, "." matches a whole
character instead of only a single byte.
• The "tr///" operator translates whole characters. (Note that the "tr///CU"
functionality has been removed. For similar functionality to that, see "pack('U0',
...)" and "pack('C0', ...)").
• "scalar reverse()" reverses by character rather than by byte.
• The bit string operators, "& | ^ ~" and (starting in v5.22) "&. |. ^. ~." can operate
on characters that don't fit into a byte. However, the current behavior is likely to
change. You should not use these operators on strings that are encoded in UTF-8. If
you're not sure about the encoding of a string, downgrade it before using any of these
operators; you can use "utf8::utf8_downgrade()".
The bottom line is that Perl has always practiced "Character Semantics", but with the
advent of Unicode, that is now different than "Byte Semantics".
ASCII Rules versus Unicode Rules
Before Unicode, when a character was a byte was a character, Perl knew only about the 128
characters defined by ASCII, code points 0 through 127 (except for under "use locale").
That left the code points 128 to 255 as unassigned, and available for whatever use a
program might want. The only semantics they have is their ordinal numbers, and that they
are members of none of the non-negative character classes. None are considered to match
"\w" for example, but all match "\W".
Unicode, of course, assigns each of those code points a particular meaning (along with
ones above 255). To preserve backward compatibility, Perl only uses the Unicode meanings
when there is some indication that Unicode is what is intended; otherwise the non-ASCII
code points remain treated as if they are unassigned.
Here are the ways that Perl knows that a string should be treated as Unicode:
• Within the scope of "use utf8"
If the whole program is Unicode (signified by using 8-bit Unicode Transformation
Format), then all strings within it must be Unicode.
• Within the scope of "use feature 'unicode_strings'"
This pragma was created so you can explicitly tell Perl that operations executed
within its scope are to use Unicode rules. More operations are affected with newer
perls. See "The "Unicode Bug"".
• Within the scope of "use 5.012" or higher
This implicitly turns on "use feature 'unicode_strings'".
• Within the scope of "use locale 'not_characters'", or "use locale" and the current
locale is a UTF-8 locale.
The former is defined to imply Unicode handling; and the latter indicates a Unicode
locale, hence a Unicode interpretation of all strings within it.
• When the string contains a Unicode-only code point
Perl has never accepted code points above 255 without them being Unicode, so their use
implies Unicode for the whole string.
• When the string contains a Unicode named code point "\N{...}"
The "\N{...}" construct explicitly refers to a Unicode code point, even if it is one
that is also in ASCII. Therefore the string containing it must be Unicode.
• When the string has come from an external source marked as Unicode
The "-C" command line option can specify that certain inputs to the program are
Unicode, and the values of this can be read by your Perl code, see "${^UNICODE}" in
perlvar.
• When the string has been upgraded to UTF-8
The function "utf8::utf8_upgrade()" can be explicitly used to permanently (unless a
subsequent "utf8::utf8_downgrade()" is called) cause a string to be treated as
Unicode.
• There are additional methods for regular expression patterns
A pattern that is compiled with the "/u" or "/a" modifiers is treated as Unicode
(though there are some restrictions with "/a"). Under the "/d" and "/l" modifiers,
there are several other indications for Unicode; see "Character set modifiers" in
perlre.
Note that all of the above are overridden within the scope of "use bytes"; but you should
be using this pragma only for debugging.
Note also that some interactions with the platform's operating system never use Unicode
rules.
When Unicode rules are in effect:
• Case translation operators use the Unicode case translation tables.
Note that "uc()", or "\U" in interpolated strings, translates to uppercase, while
"ucfirst", or "\u" in interpolated strings, translates to titlecase in languages that
make the distinction (which is equivalent to uppercase in languages without the
distinction).
There is a CPAN module, "Unicode::Casing", which allows you to define your own
mappings to be used in "lc()", "lcfirst()", "uc()", "ucfirst()", and "fc" (or their
double-quoted string inlined versions such as "\U"). (Prior to Perl 5.16, this
functionality was partially provided in the Perl core, but suffered from a number of
insurmountable drawbacks, so the CPAN module was written instead.)
• Character classes in regular expressions match based on the character properties
specified in the Unicode properties database.
"\w" can be used to match a Japanese ideograph, for instance; and "[[:digit:]]" a
Bengali number.
• Named Unicode properties, scripts, and block ranges may be used (like bracketed
character classes) by using the "\p{}" "matches property" construct and the "\P{}"
negation, "doesn't match property".
See "Unicode Character Properties" for more details.
You can define your own character properties and use them in the regular expression
with the "\p{}" or "\P{}" construct. See "User-Defined Character Properties" for more
details.
Extended Grapheme Clusters (Logical characters)
Consider a character, say "H". It could appear with various marks around it, such as an
acute accent, or a circumflex, or various hooks, circles, arrows, etc., above, below, to
one side or the other, etc. There are many possibilities among the world's languages.
The number of combinations is astronomical, and if there were a character for each
combination, it would soon exhaust Unicode's more than a million possible characters. So
Unicode took a different approach: there is a character for the base "H", and a character
for each of the possible marks, and these can be variously combined to get a final logical
character. So a logical character--what appears to be a single character--can be a
sequence of more than one individual characters. The Unicode standard calls these
"extended grapheme clusters" (which is an improved version of the no-longer much used
"grapheme cluster"); Perl furnishes the "\X" regular expression construct to match such
sequences in their entirety.
But Unicode's intent is to unify the existing character set standards and practices, and
several pre-existing standards have single characters that mean the same thing as some of
these combinations, like ISO-8859-1, which has quite a few of them. For example, "LATIN
CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE" was already in this standard when Unicode came along.
Unicode therefore added it to its repertoire as that single character. But this character
is considered by Unicode to be equivalent to the sequence consisting of the character
"LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E" followed by the character "COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT".
"LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE" is called a "pre-composed" character, and its
equivalence with the "E" and the "COMBINING ACCENT" sequence is called canonical
equivalence. All pre-composed characters are said to have a decomposition (into the
equivalent sequence), and the decomposition type is also called canonical. A string may
be comprised as much as possible of precomposed characters, or it may be comprised of
entirely decomposed characters. Unicode calls these respectively, "Normalization Form
Composed" (NFC) and "Normalization Form Decomposed". The "Unicode::Normalize" module
contains functions that convert between the two. A string may also have both composed
characters and decomposed characters; this module can be used to make it all one or the
other.
You may be presented with strings in any of these equivalent forms. There is currently
nothing in Perl 5 that ignores the differences. So you'll have to specially hanlde it.
The usual advice is to convert your inputs to "NFD" before processing further.
For more detailed information, see <http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/>.
Unicode Character Properties
(The only time that Perl considers a sequence of individual code points as a single
logical character is in the "\X" construct, already mentioned above. Therefore
"character" in this discussion means a single Unicode code point.)
Very nearly all Unicode character properties are accessible through regular expressions by
using the "\p{}" "matches property" construct and the "\P{}" "doesn't match property" for
its negation.
For instance, "\p{Uppercase}" matches any single character with the Unicode "Uppercase"
property, while "\p{L}" matches any character with a "General_Category" of "L" (letter)
property (see "General_Category" below). Brackets are not required for single letter
property names, so "\p{L}" is equivalent to "\pL".
More formally, "\p{Uppercase}" matches any single character whose Unicode "Uppercase"
property value is "True", and "\P{Uppercase}" matches any character whose "Uppercase"
property value is "False", and they could have been written as "\p{Uppercase=True}" and
"\p{Uppercase=False}", respectively.
This formality is needed when properties are not binary; that is, if they can take on more
values than just "True" and "False". For example, the "Bidi_Class" property (see
"Bidirectional Character Types" below), can take on several different values, such as
"Left", "Right", "Whitespace", and others. To match these, one needs to specify both the
property name ("Bidi_Class"), AND the value being matched against ("Left", "Right", etc.).
This is done, as in the examples above, by having the two components separated by an equal
sign (or interchangeably, a colon), like "\p{Bidi_Class: Left}".
All Unicode-defined character properties may be written in these compound forms of
"\p{property=value}" or "\p{property:value}", but Perl provides some additional properties
that are written only in the single form, as well as single-form short-cuts for all binary
properties and certain others described below, in which you may omit the property name and
the equals or colon separator.
Most Unicode character properties have at least two synonyms (or aliases if you prefer): a
short one that is easier to type and a longer one that is more descriptive and hence
easier to understand. Thus the "L" and "Letter" properties above are equivalent and can
be used interchangeably. Likewise, "Upper" is a synonym for "Uppercase", and we could
have written "\p{Uppercase}" equivalently as "\p{Upper}". Also, there are typically
various synonyms for the values the property can be. For binary properties, "True" has 3
synonyms: "T", "Yes", and "Y"; and "False" has correspondingly "F", "No", and "N". But be
careful. A short form of a value for one property may not mean the same thing as the same
short form for another. Thus, for the "General_Category" property, "L" means "Letter",
but for the "Bidi_Class" property, "L" means "Left". A complete list of properties and
synonyms is in perluniprops.
Upper/lower case differences in property names and values are irrelevant; thus "\p{Upper}"
means the same thing as "\p{upper}" or even "\p{UpPeR}". Similarly, you can add or
subtract underscores anywhere in the middle of a word, so that these are also equivalent
to "\p{U_p_p_e_r}". And white space is irrelevant adjacent to non-word characters, such
as the braces and the equals or colon separators, so "\p{ Upper }" and "\p{ Upper_case
: Y }" are equivalent to these as well. In fact, white space and even hyphens can usually
be added or deleted anywhere. So even "\p{ Up-per case = Yes}" is equivalent. All this
is called "loose-matching" by Unicode. The few places where stricter matching is used is
in the middle of numbers, and in the Perl extension properties that begin or end with an
underscore. Stricter matching cares about white space (except adjacent to non-word
characters), hyphens, and non-interior underscores.
You can also use negation in both "\p{}" and "\P{}" by introducing a caret ("^") between
the first brace and the property name: "\p{^Tamil}" is equal to "\P{Tamil}".
Almost all properties are immune to case-insensitive matching. That is, adding a "/i"
regular expression modifier does not change what they match. There are two sets that are
affected. The first set is "Uppercase_Letter", "Lowercase_Letter", and
"Titlecase_Letter", all of which match "Cased_Letter" under "/i" matching. And the second
set is "Uppercase", "Lowercase", and "Titlecase", all of which match "Cased" under "/i"
matching. This set also includes its subsets "PosixUpper" and "PosixLower" both of which
under "/i" match "PosixAlpha". (The difference between these sets is that some things,
such as Roman numerals, come in both upper and lower case so they are "Cased", but aren't
considered letters, so they aren't "Cased_Letter"'s.)
See "Beyond Unicode code points" for special considerations when matching Unicode
properties against non-Unicode code points.
General_Category
Every Unicode character is assigned a general category, which is the "most usual
categorization of a character" (from <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>).
The compound way of writing these is like "\p{General_Category=Number}" (short:
"\p{gc:n}"). But Perl furnishes shortcuts in which everything up through the equal or
colon separator is omitted. So you can instead just write "\pN".
Here are the short and long forms of the values the "General Category" property can have:
Short Long
L Letter
LC, L& Cased_Letter (that is: [\p{Ll}\p{Lu}\p{Lt}])
Lu Uppercase_Letter
Ll Lowercase_Letter
Lt Titlecase_Letter
Lm Modifier_Letter
Lo Other_Letter
M Mark
Mn Nonspacing_Mark
Mc Spacing_Mark
Me Enclosing_Mark
N Number
Nd Decimal_Number (also Digit)
Nl Letter_Number
No Other_Number
P Punctuation (also Punct)
Pc Connector_Punctuation
Pd Dash_Punctuation
Ps Open_Punctuation
Pe Close_Punctuation
Pi Initial_Punctuation
(may behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage)
Pf Final_Punctuation
(may behave like Ps or Pe depending on usage)
Po Other_Punctuation
S Symbol
Sm Math_Symbol
Sc Currency_Symbol
Sk Modifier_Symbol
So Other_Symbol
Z Separator
Zs Space_Separator
Zl Line_Separator
Zp Paragraph_Separator
C Other
Cc Control (also Cntrl)
Cf Format
Cs Surrogate
Co Private_Use
Cn Unassigned
Single-letter properties match all characters in any of the two-letter sub-properties
starting with the same letter. "LC" and "L&" are special: both are aliases for the set
consisting of everything matched by "Ll", "Lu", and "Lt".
Bidirectional Character Types
Because scripts differ in their directionality (Hebrew and Arabic are written right to
left, for example) Unicode supplies a "Bidi_Class" property. Some of the values this
property can have are:
Value Meaning
L Left-to-Right
LRE Left-to-Right Embedding
LRO Left-to-Right Override
R Right-to-Left
AL Arabic Letter
RLE Right-to-Left Embedding
RLO Right-to-Left Override
PDF Pop Directional Format
EN European Number
ES European Separator
ET European Terminator
AN Arabic Number
CS Common Separator
NSM Non-Spacing Mark
BN Boundary Neutral
B Paragraph Separator
S Segment Separator
WS Whitespace
ON Other Neutrals
This property is always written in the compound form. For example, "\p{Bidi_Class:R}"
matches characters that are normally written right to left. Unlike the "General_Category"
property, this property can have more values added in a future Unicode release. Those
listed above comprised the complete set for many Unicode releases, but others were added
in Unicode 6.3; you can always find what the current ones are in in perluniprops. And
<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/> describes how to use them.
Scripts
The world's languages are written in many different scripts. This sentence (unless you're
reading it in translation) is written in Latin, while Russian is written in Cyrillic, and
Greek is written in, well, Greek; Japanese mainly in Hiragana or Katakana. There are many
more.
The Unicode "Script" and "Script_Extensions" properties give what script a given character
is in. Either property can be specified with the compound form like "\p{Script=Hebrew}"
(short: "\p{sc=hebr}"), or "\p{Script_Extensions=Javanese}" (short: "\p{scx=java}"). In
addition, Perl furnishes shortcuts for all "Script" property names. You can omit
everything up through the equals (or colon), and simply write "\p{Latin}" or
"\P{Cyrillic}". (This is not true for "Script_Extensions", which is required to be
written in the compound form.)
The difference between these two properties involves characters that are used in multiple
scripts. For example the digits '0' through '9' are used in many parts of the world.
These are placed in a script named "Common". Other characters are used in just a few
scripts. For example, the "KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN" is used in both Japanese
scripts, Katakana and Hiragana, but nowhere else. The "Script" property places all
characters that are used in multiple scripts in the "Common" script, while the
"Script_Extensions" property places those that are used in only a few scripts into each of
those scripts; while still using "Common" for those used in many scripts. Thus both these
match:
"0" =~ /\p{sc=Common}/ # Matches
"0" =~ /\p{scx=Common}/ # Matches
and only the first of these match:
"\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{sc=Common} # Matches
"\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{scx=Common} # No match
And only the last two of these match:
"\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{sc=Hiragana} # No match
"\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{sc=Katakana} # No match
"\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{scx=Hiragana} # Matches
"\N{KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN}" =~ /\p{scx=Katakana} # Matches
"Script_Extensions" is thus an improved "Script", in which there are fewer characters in
the "Common" script, and correspondingly more in other scripts. It is new in Unicode
version 6.0, and its data are likely to change significantly in later releases, as things
get sorted out. New code should probably be using "Script_Extensions" and not plain
"Script".
(Actually, besides "Common", the "Inherited" script, contains characters that are used in
multiple scripts. These are modifier characters which inherit the script value of the
controlling character. Some of these are used in many scripts, and so go into "Inherited"
in both "Script" and "Script_Extensions". Others are used in just a few scripts, so are
in "Inherited" in "Script", but not in "Script_Extensions".)
It is worth stressing that there are several different sets of digits in Unicode that are
equivalent to 0-9 and are matchable by "\d" in a regular expression. If they are used in
a single language only, they are in that language's "Script" and "Script_Extension". If
they are used in more than one script, they will be in "sc=Common", but only if they are
used in many scripts should they be in "scx=Common".
A complete list of scripts and their shortcuts is in perluniprops.
Use of the "Is" Prefix
For backward compatibility (with Perl 5.6), all properties writable without using the
compound form mentioned so far may have "Is" or "Is_" prepended to their name, so
"\P{Is_Lu}", for example, is equal to "\P{Lu}", and "\p{IsScript:Arabic}" is equal to
"\p{Arabic}".
Blocks
In addition to scripts, Unicode also defines blocks of characters. The difference between
scripts and blocks is that the concept of scripts is closer to natural languages, while
the concept of blocks is more of an artificial grouping based on groups of Unicode
characters with consecutive ordinal values. For example, the "Basic Latin" block is all
the characters whose ordinals are between 0 and 127, inclusive; in other words, the ASCII
characters. The "Latin" script contains some letters from this as well as several other
blocks, like "Latin-1 Supplement", "Latin Extended-A", etc., but it does not contain all
the characters from those blocks. It does not, for example, contain the digits 0-9,
because those digits are shared across many scripts, and hence are in the "Common" script.
For more about scripts versus blocks, see UAX#24 "Unicode Script Property":
<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr24>
The "Script" or "Script_Extensions" properties are likely to be the ones you want to use
when processing natural language; the "Block" property may occasionally be useful in
working with the nuts and bolts of Unicode.
Block names are matched in the compound form, like "\p{Block: Arrows}" or
"\p{Blk=Hebrew}". Unlike most other properties, only a few block names have a Unicode-
defined short name. But Perl does provide a (slight, no longer recommended) shortcut:
You can say, for example "\p{In_Arrows}" or "\p{In_Hebrew}".
For backwards compatibility, the "In" prefix may be omitted if there is no naming conflict
with a script or any other property, and you can even use an "Is" prefix instead in those
cases. But don't do this for new code because your code could break in new releases, and
this has already happened: There was a time in very early Unicode releases when
"\p{Hebrew}" would have matched the block Hebrew; now it doesn't.
Using the "In" prefix avoids this ambiguity, so far. But new versions of Unicode continue
to add new properties whose names begin with "In". There is a possibility that one of
them someday will conflict with your usage. Since this is just a Perl extension,
Unicode's name will take precedence and your code will become broken. Also, Unicode is
free to add a script whose name begins with "In"; that would cause problems.
So it's clearer and best to use the compound form when specifying blocks. And be sure
that is what you really really want to do. In most cases scripts are what you want
instead.
A complete list of blocks and their shortcuts is in perluniprops.
Other Properties
There are many more properties than the very basic ones described here. A complete list
is in perluniprops.
Unicode defines all its properties in the compound form, so all single-form properties are
Perl extensions. Most of these are just synonyms for the Unicode ones, but some are
genuine extensions, including several that are in the compound form. And quite a few of
these are actually recommended by Unicode (in <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18>).
This section gives some details on all extensions that aren't just synonyms for compound-
form Unicode properties (for those properties, you'll have to refer to the Unicode
Standard <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>.
"\p{All}"
This matches every possible code point. It is equivalent to "qr/./s". Unlike all the
other non-user-defined "\p{}" property matches, no warning is ever generated if this
is property is matched against a non-Unicode code point (see "Beyond Unicode code
points" below).
"\p{Alnum}"
This matches any "\p{Alphabetic}" or "\p{Decimal_Number}" character.
"\p{Any}"
This matches any of the 1_114_112 Unicode code points. It is a synonym for
"\p{Unicode}".
"\p{ASCII}"
This matches any of the 128 characters in the US-ASCII character set, which is a
subset of Unicode.
"\p{Assigned}"
This matches any assigned code point; that is, any code point whose general category
is not "Unassigned" (or equivalently, not "Cn").
"\p{Blank}"
This is the same as "\h" and "\p{HorizSpace}": A character that changes the spacing
horizontally.
"\p{Decomposition_Type: Non_Canonical}" (Short: "\p{Dt=NonCanon}")
Matches a character that has a non-canonical decomposition.
The "Extended Grapheme Clusters (Logical characters)" section above talked about
canonical decompositions. However, many more characters have a different type of
decomposition, a "compatible" or "non-canonical" decomposition. The sequences that
form these decompositions are not considered canonically equivalent to the pre-
composed character. An example is the "SUPERSCRIPT ONE". It is somewhat like a
regular digit 1, but not exactly; its decomposition into the digit 1 is called a
"compatible" decomposition, specifically a "super" decomposition. There are several
such compatibility decompositions (see <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>),
including one called "compat", which means some miscellaneous type of decomposition
that doesn't fit into the other decomposition categories that Unicode has chosen.
Note that most Unicode characters don't have a decomposition, so their decomposition
type is "None".
For your convenience, Perl has added the "Non_Canonical" decomposition type to mean
any of the several compatibility decompositions.
"\p{Graph}"
Matches any character that is graphic. Theoretically, this means a character that on
a printer would cause ink to be used.
"\p{HorizSpace}"
This is the same as "\h" and "\p{Blank}": a character that changes the spacing
horizontally.
"\p{In=*}"
This is a synonym for "\p{Present_In=*}"
"\p{PerlSpace}"
This is the same as "\s", restricted to ASCII, namely "[ \f\n\r\t]" and starting in
Perl v5.18, a vertical tab.
Mnemonic: Perl's (original) space
"\p{PerlWord}"
This is the same as "\w", restricted to ASCII, namely "[A-Za-z0-9_]"
Mnemonic: Perl's (original) word.
"\p{Posix...}"
There are several of these, which are equivalents, using the "\p{}" notation, for
Posix classes and are described in "POSIX Character Classes" in perlrecharclass.
"\p{Present_In: *}" (Short: "\p{In=*}")
This property is used when you need to know in what Unicode version(s) a character is.
The "*" above stands for some two digit Unicode version number, such as 1.1 or 4.0; or
the "*" can also be "Unassigned". This property will match the code points whose
final disposition has been settled as of the Unicode release given by the version
number; "\p{Present_In: Unassigned}" will match those code points whose meaning has
yet to be assigned.
For example, "U+0041" "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A" was present in the very first Unicode
release available, which is 1.1, so this property is true for all valid "*" versions.
On the other hand, "U+1EFF" was not assigned until version 5.1 when it became "LATIN
SMALL LETTER Y WITH LOOP", so the only "*" that would match it are 5.1, 5.2, and
later.
Unicode furnishes the "Age" property from which this is derived. The problem with Age
is that a strict interpretation of it (which Perl takes) has it matching the precise
release a code point's meaning is introduced in. Thus "U+0041" would match only 1.1;
and "U+1EFF" only 5.1. This is not usually what you want.
Some non-Perl implementations of the Age property may change its meaning to be the
same as the Perl "Present_In" property; just be aware of that.
Another confusion with both these properties is that the definition is not that the
code point has been assigned, but that the meaning of the code point has been
determined. This is because 66 code points will always be unassigned, and so the
"Age" for them is the Unicode version in which the decision to make them so was made.
For example, "U+FDD0" is to be permanently unassigned to a character, and the decision
to do that was made in version 3.1, so "\p{Age=3.1}" matches this character, as also
does "\p{Present_In: 3.1}" and up.
"\p{Print}"
This matches any character that is graphical or blank, except controls.
"\p{SpacePerl}"
This is the same as "\s", including beyond ASCII.
Mnemonic: Space, as modified by Perl. (It doesn't include the vertical tab until
v5.18, which both the Posix standard and Unicode consider white space.)
"\p{Title}" and "\p{Titlecase}"
Under case-sensitive matching, these both match the same code points as "\p{General
Category=Titlecase_Letter}" ("\p{gc=lt}"). The difference is that under "/i" caseless
matching, these match the same as "\p{Cased}", whereas "\p{gc=lt}" matches
"\p{Cased_Letter").
"\p{Unicode}"
This matches any of the 1_114_112 Unicode code points. "\p{Any}".
"\p{VertSpace}"
This is the same as "\v": A character that changes the spacing vertically.
"\p{Word}"
This is the same as "\w", including over 100_000 characters beyond ASCII.
"\p{XPosix...}"
There are several of these, which are the standard Posix classes extended to the full
Unicode range. They are described in "POSIX Character Classes" in perlrecharclass.
User-Defined Character Properties
You can define your own binary character properties by defining subroutines whose names
begin with "In" or "Is". (The experimental feature "(?[ ])" in perlre provides an
alternative which allows more complex definitions.) The subroutines can be defined in any
package. The user-defined properties can be used in the regular expression "\p{}" and
"\P{}" constructs; if you are using a user-defined property from a package other than the
one you are in, you must specify its package in the "\p{}" or "\P{}" construct.
# assuming property Is_Foreign defined in Lang::
package main; # property package name required
if ($txt =~ /\p{Lang::IsForeign}+/) { ... }
package Lang; # property package name not required
if ($txt =~ /\p{IsForeign}+/) { ... }
Note that the effect is compile-time and immutable once defined. However, the subroutines
are passed a single parameter, which is 0 if case-sensitive matching is in effect and non-
zero if caseless matching is in effect. The subroutine may return different values
depending on the value of the flag, and one set of values will immutably be in effect for
all case-sensitive matches, and the other set for all case-insensitive matches.
Note that if the regular expression is tainted, then Perl will die rather than calling the
subroutine when the name of the subroutine is determined by the tainted data.
The subroutines must return a specially-formatted string, with one or more newline-
separated lines. Each line must be one of the following:
• A single hexadecimal number denoting a code point to include.
• Two hexadecimal numbers separated by horizontal whitespace (space or tabular
characters) denoting a range of code points to include.
• Something to include, prefixed by "+": a built-in character property (prefixed by
"utf8::") or a fully qualified (including package name) user-defined character
property, to represent all the characters in that property; two hexadecimal code
points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.
• Something to exclude, prefixed by "-": an existing character property (prefixed by
"utf8::") or a fully qualified (including package name) user-defined character
property, to represent all the characters in that property; two hexadecimal code
points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.
• Something to negate, prefixed "!": an existing character property (prefixed by
"utf8::") or a fully qualified (including package name) user-defined character
property, to represent all the characters in that property; two hexadecimal code
points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.
• Something to intersect with, prefixed by "&": an existing character property (prefixed
by "utf8::") or a fully qualified (including package name) user-defined character
property, for all the characters except the characters in the property; two
hexadecimal code points for a range; or a single hexadecimal code point.
For example, to define a property that covers both the Japanese syllabaries (hiragana and
katakana), you can define
sub InKana {
return <<END;
3040\t309F
30A0\t30FF
END
}
Imagine that the here-doc end marker is at the beginning of the line. Now you can use
"\p{InKana}" and "\P{InKana}".
You could also have used the existing block property names:
sub InKana {
return <<'END';
+utf8::InHiragana
+utf8::InKatakana
END
}
Suppose you wanted to match only the allocated characters, not the raw block ranges: in
other words, you want to remove the unassigned characters:
sub InKana {
return <<'END';
+utf8::InHiragana
+utf8::InKatakana
-utf8::IsCn
END
}
The negation is useful for defining (surprise!) negated classes.
sub InNotKana {
return <<'END';
!utf8::InHiragana
-utf8::InKatakana
+utf8::IsCn
END
}
This will match all non-Unicode code points, since every one of them is not in Kana. You
can use intersection to exclude these, if desired, as this modified example shows:
sub InNotKana {
return <<'END';
!utf8::InHiragana
-utf8::InKatakana
+utf8::IsCn
&utf8::Any
END
}
&utf8::Any must be the last line in the definition.
Intersection is used generally for getting the common characters matched by two (or more)
classes. It's important to remember not to use "&" for the first set; that would be
intersecting with nothing, resulting in an empty set.
Unlike non-user-defined "\p{}" property matches, no warning is ever generated if these
properties are matched against a non-Unicode code point (see "Beyond Unicode code points"
below).
User-Defined Case Mappings (for serious hackers only)
This feature has been removed as of Perl 5.16. The CPAN module "Unicode::Casing" provides
better functionality without the drawbacks that this feature had. If you are using a Perl
earlier than 5.16, this feature was most fully documented in the 5.14 version of this pod:
<http://perldoc.perl.org/5.14.0/perlunicode.html#User-Defined-Case-Mappings-%28for-serious-hackers-only%29>
Character Encodings for Input and Output
See Encode.
Unicode Regular Expression Support Level
The following list of Unicode supported features for regular expressions describes all
features currently directly supported by core Perl. The references to "Level N" and the
section numbers refer to the Unicode Technical Standard #18, "Unicode Regular
Expressions", version 13, from August 2008.
• Level 1 - Basic Unicode Support
RL1.1 Hex Notation - done [1]
RL1.2 Properties - done [2][3]
RL1.2a Compatibility Properties - done [4]
RL1.3 Subtraction and Intersection - experimental [5]
RL1.4 Simple Word Boundaries - done [6]
RL1.5 Simple Loose Matches - done [7]
RL1.6 Line Boundaries - MISSING [8][9]
RL1.7 Supplementary Code Points - done [10]
[1] "\N{U+...}" and "\x{...}"
[2] "\p{...}" "\P{...}"
[3] supports not only minimal list, but all Unicode character properties (see Unicode
Character Properties above)
[4] "\d" "\D" "\s" "\S" "\w" "\W" "\X" "[:prop:]" "[:^prop:]"
[5] The experimental feature starting in v5.18 "(?[...])" accomplishes this.
See "(?[ ])" in perlre. If you don't want to use an experimental feature, you can
use one of the following:
• Regular expression look-ahead
You can mimic class subtraction using lookahead. For example, what UTS#18
might write as
[{Block=Greek}-[{UNASSIGNED}]]
in Perl can be written as:
(?!\p{Unassigned})\p{Block=Greek}
(?=\p{Assigned})\p{Block=Greek}
But in this particular example, you probably really want
\p{Greek}
which will match assigned characters known to be part of the Greek script.
• CPAN module "Unicode::Regex::Set"
It does implement the full UTS#18 grouping, intersection, union, and removal
(subtraction) syntax.
• "User-Defined Character Properties"
"+" for union, "-" for removal (set-difference), "&" for intersection
[6] "\b" "\B"
[7] Note that Perl does Full case-folding in matching, not Simple:
For example "U+1F88" is equivalent to "U+1F00 U+03B9", instead of just "U+1F80".
This difference matters mainly for certain Greek capital letters with certain
modifiers: the Full case-folding decomposes the letter, while the Simple case-
folding would map it to a single character.
[8] Perl treats "\n" as the start- and end-line delimiter. Unicode specifies more
characters that should be so-interpreted.
These are:
VT U+000B (\v in C)
FF U+000C (\f)
CR U+000D (\r)
NEL U+0085
LS U+2028
PS U+2029
"^" and "$" in regular expression patterns are supposed to match all these, but
don't. These characters also don't, but should, affect "<>" $., and script line
numbers.
Also, lines should not be split within "CRLF" (i.e. there is no empty line between
"\r" and "\n"). For "CRLF", try the ":crlf" layer (see PerlIO).
[9] But "Unicode::LineBreak" is available.
This module supplies line breaking conformant with UAX#14 "Unicode Line Breaking
Algorithm" <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14>.
[10] UTF-8/UTF-EBDDIC used in Perl allows not only "U+10000" to "U+10FFFF" but also
beyond "U+10FFFF"
• Level 2 - Extended Unicode Support
RL2.1 Canonical Equivalents - MISSING [10][11]
RL2.2 Default Grapheme Clusters - MISSING [12]
RL2.3 Default Word Boundaries - DONE [14]
RL2.4 Default Loose Matches - MISSING [15]
RL2.5 Name Properties - DONE
RL2.6 Wildcard Properties - MISSING
[10] see UAX#15 "Unicode Normalization Forms"
[11] have Unicode::Normalize but not integrated to regexes
[12] have \X and \b{gcb} but we don't have a "Grapheme Cluster
Mode"
[14] see UAX#29, Word Boundaries
[15] This is covered in Chapter 3.13 (in Unicode 6.0)
• Level 3 - Tailored Support
RL3.1 Tailored Punctuation - MISSING
RL3.2 Tailored Grapheme Clusters - MISSING [17][18]
RL3.3 Tailored Word Boundaries - MISSING
RL3.4 Tailored Loose Matches - MISSING
RL3.5 Tailored Ranges - MISSING
RL3.6 Context Matching - MISSING [19]
RL3.7 Incremental Matches - MISSING
( RL3.8 Unicode Set Sharing )
RL3.9 Possible Match Sets - MISSING
RL3.10 Folded Matching - MISSING [20]
RL3.11 Submatchers - MISSING
[17] see UAX#10 "Unicode Collation Algorithms"
[18] have Unicode::Collate but not integrated to regexes
[19] have (?<=x) and (?=x), but look-aheads or look-behinds
should see outside of the target substring
[20] need insensitive matching for linguistic features other
than case; for example, hiragana to katakana, wide and
narrow, simplified Han to traditional Han (see UTR#30
"Character Foldings")
Unicode Encodings
Unicode characters are assigned to code points, which are abstract numbers. To use these
numbers, various encodings are needed.
• UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-length (1 to 4 bytes), byte-order independent encoding. In most
of Perl's documentation, including elsewhere in this document, the term "UTF-8" means
also "UTF-EBCDIC". But in this section, "UTF-8" refers only to the encoding used on
ASCII platforms. It is a superset of 7-bit US-ASCII, so anything encoded in ASCII has
the identical representation when encoded in UTF-8.
The following table is from Unicode 3.2.
Code Points 1st Byte 2nd Byte 3rd Byte 4th Byte
U+0000..U+007F 00..7F
U+0080..U+07FF * C2..DF 80..BF
U+0800..U+0FFF E0 * A0..BF 80..BF
U+1000..U+CFFF E1..EC 80..BF 80..BF
U+D000..U+D7FF ED 80..9F 80..BF
U+D800..U+DFFF +++++ utf16 surrogates, not legal utf8 +++++
U+E000..U+FFFF EE..EF 80..BF 80..BF
U+10000..U+3FFFF F0 * 90..BF 80..BF 80..BF
U+40000..U+FFFFF F1..F3 80..BF 80..BF 80..BF
U+100000..U+10FFFF F4 80..8F 80..BF 80..BF
Note the gaps marked by "*" before several of the byte entries above. These are
caused by legal UTF-8 avoiding non-shortest encodings: it is technically possible to
UTF-8-encode a single code point in different ways, but that is explicitly forbidden,
and the shortest possible encoding should always be used (and that is what Perl does).
Another way to look at it is via bits:
Code Points 1st Byte 2nd Byte 3rd Byte 4th Byte
0aaaaaaa 0aaaaaaa
00000bbbbbaaaaaa 110bbbbb 10aaaaaa
ccccbbbbbbaaaaaa 1110cccc 10bbbbbb 10aaaaaa
00000dddccccccbbbbbbaaaaaa 11110ddd 10cccccc 10bbbbbb 10aaaaaa
As you can see, the continuation bytes all begin with "10", and the leading bits of
the start byte tell how many bytes there are in the encoded character.
The original UTF-8 specification allowed up to 6 bytes, to allow encoding of numbers
up to "0x7FFF_FFFF". Perl continues to allow those, and has extended that up to 13
bytes to encode code points up to what can fit in a 64-bit word. However, Perl will
warn if you output any of these as being non-portable; and under strict UTF-8 input
protocols, they are forbidden.
• UTF-EBCDIC
Like UTF-8, but EBCDIC-safe, in the way that UTF-8 is ASCII-safe. This means that all
the basic characters (which includes all those that have ASCII equivalents (like "A",
"0", "%", etc.) are the same in both EBCDIC and UTF-EBCDIC.)
UTF-EBCDIC is used on EBCDIC platforms. The largest Unicode code points take 5 bytes
to represent (instead of 4 in UTF-8), and Perl extends it to a maximum of 7 bytes to
encode pode points up to what can fit in a 32-bit word (instead of 13 bytes and a
64-bit word in UTF-8).
• UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, Surrogates, and "BOM"'s (Byte Order Marks)
The followings items are mostly for reference and general Unicode knowledge, Perl
doesn't use these constructs internally.
Like UTF-8, UTF-16 is a variable-width encoding, but where UTF-8 uses 8-bit code
units, UTF-16 uses 16-bit code units. All code points occupy either 2 or 4 bytes in
UTF-16: code points "U+0000..U+FFFF" are stored in a single 16-bit unit, and code
points "U+10000..U+10FFFF" in two 16-bit units. The latter case is using surrogates,
the first 16-bit unit being the high surrogate, and the second being the low
surrogate.
Surrogates are code points set aside to encode the "U+10000..U+10FFFF" range of
Unicode code points in pairs of 16-bit units. The high surrogates are the range
"U+D800..U+DBFF" and the low surrogates are the range "U+DC00..U+DFFF". The surrogate
encoding is
$hi = ($uni - 0x10000) / 0x400 + 0xD800;
$lo = ($uni - 0x10000) % 0x400 + 0xDC00;
and the decoding is
$uni = 0x10000 + ($hi - 0xD800) * 0x400 + ($lo - 0xDC00);
Because of the 16-bitness, UTF-16 is byte-order dependent. UTF-16 itself can be used
for in-memory computations, but if storage or transfer is required either UTF-16BE
(big-endian) or UTF-16LE (little-endian) encodings must be chosen.
This introduces another problem: what if you just know that your data is UTF-16, but
you don't know which endianness? Byte Order Marks, or "BOM"'s, are a solution to
this. A special character has been reserved in Unicode to function as a byte order
marker: the character with the code point "U+FEFF" is the "BOM".
The trick is that if you read a "BOM", you will know the byte order, since if it was
written on a big-endian platform, you will read the bytes "0xFE 0xFF", but if it was
written on a little-endian platform, you will read the bytes "0xFF 0xFE". (And if the
originating platform was writing in ASCII platform UTF-8, you will read the bytes
"0xEF 0xBB 0xBF".)
The way this trick works is that the character with the code point "U+FFFE" is not
supposed to be in input streams, so the sequence of bytes "0xFF 0xFE" is unambiguously
""BOM", represented in little-endian format" and cannot be "U+FFFE", represented in
big-endian format".
Surrogates have no meaning in Unicode outside their use in pairs to represent other
code points. However, Perl allows them to be represented individually internally, for
example by saying "chr(0xD801)", so that all code points, not just those valid for
open interchange, are representable. Unicode does define semantics for them, such as
their "General_Category" is "Cs". But because their use is somewhat dangerous, Perl
will warn (using the warning category "surrogate", which is a sub-category of "utf8")
if an attempt is made to do things like take the lower case of one, or match case-
insensitively, or to output them. (But don't try this on Perls before 5.14.)
• UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE
The UTF-32 family is pretty much like the UTF-16 family, except that the units are
32-bit, and therefore the surrogate scheme is not needed. UTF-32 is a fixed-width
encoding. The "BOM" signatures are "0x00 0x00 0xFE 0xFF" for BE and "0xFF 0xFE 0x00
0x00" for LE.
• UCS-2, UCS-4
Legacy, fixed-width encodings defined by the ISO 10646 standard. UCS-2 is a 16-bit
encoding. Unlike UTF-16, UCS-2 is not extensible beyond "U+FFFF", because it does not
use surrogates. UCS-4 is a 32-bit encoding, functionally identical to UTF-32 (the
difference being that UCS-4 forbids neither surrogates nor code points larger than
"0x10_FFFF").
• UTF-7
A seven-bit safe (non-eight-bit) encoding, which is useful if the transport or storage
is not eight-bit safe. Defined by RFC 2152.
Noncharacter code points
66 code points are set aside in Unicode as "noncharacter code points". These all have the
"Unassigned" ("Cn") "General_Category", and no character will ever be assigned to any of
them. They are the 32 code points between "U+FDD0" and "U+FDEF" inclusive, and the 34
code points:
U+FFFE U+FFFF
U+1FFFE U+1FFFF
U+2FFFE U+2FFFF
...
U+EFFFE U+EFFFF
U+FFFFE U+FFFFF
U+10FFFE U+10FFFF
Until Unicode 7.0, the noncharacters were "forbidden for use in open interchange of
Unicode text data", so that code that processed those streams could use these code points
as sentinels that could be mixed in with character data, and would always be
distinguishable from that data. (Emphasis above and in the next paragraph are added in
this document.)
Unicode 7.0 changed the wording so that they are "not recommended for use in open
interchange of Unicode text data". The 7.0 Standard goes on to say:
"If a noncharacter is received in open interchange, an application is not required to
interpret it in any way. It is good practice, however, to recognize it as a
noncharacter and to take appropriate action, such as replacing it with "U+FFFD"
replacement character, to indicate the problem in the text. It is not recommended to
simply delete noncharacter code points from such text, because of the potential
security issues caused by deleting uninterpreted characters. (See conformance clause
C7 in Section 3.2, Conformance Requirements, and Unicode Technical Report #36,
"Unicode Security Considerations"
<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36/#Substituting_for_Ill_Formed_Subsequences>)."
This change was made because it was found that various commercial tools like editors, or
for things like source code control, had been written so that they would not handle
program files that used these code points, effectively precluding their use almost
entirely! And that was never the intent. They've always been meant to be usable within
an application, or cooperating set of applications, at will.
If you're writing code, such as an editor, that is supposed to be able to handle any
Unicode text data, then you shouldn't be using these code points yourself, and instead
allow them in the input. If you need sentinels, they should instead be something that
isn't legal Unicode. For UTF-8 data, you can use the bytes 0xC1 and 0xC2 as sentinels, as
they never appear in well-formed UTF-8. (There are equivalents for UTF-EBCDIC). You can
also store your Unicode code points in integer variables and use negative values as
sentinels.
If you're not writing such a tool, then whether you accept noncharacters as input is up to
you (though the Standard recommends that you not). If you do strict input stream checking
with Perl, these code points continue to be forbidden. This is to maintain backward
compatibility (otherwise potential security holes could open up, as an unsuspecting
application that was written assuming the noncharacters would be filtered out before
getting to it, could now, without warning, start getting them). To do strict checking,
you can use the layer ":encoding('UTF-8')".
Perl continues to warn (using the warning category "nonchar", which is a sub-category of
"utf8") if an attempt is made to output noncharacters.
Beyond Unicode code points
The maximum Unicode code point is "U+10FFFF", and Unicode only defines operations on code
points up through that. But Perl works on code points up to the maximum permissible
unsigned number available on the platform. However, Perl will not accept these from input
streams unless lax rules are being used, and will warn (using the warning category
"non_unicode", which is a sub-category of "utf8") if any are output.
Since Unicode rules are not defined on these code points, if a Unicode-defined operation
is done on them, Perl uses what we believe are sensible rules, while generally warning,
using the "non_unicode" category. For example, "uc("\x{11_0000}")" will generate such a
warning, returning the input parameter as its result, since Perl defines the uppercase of
every non-Unicode code point to be the code point itself. (All the case changing
operations, not just uppercasing, work this way.)
The situation with matching Unicode properties in regular expressions, the "\p{}" and
"\P{}" constructs, against these code points is not as clear cut, and how these are
handled has changed as we've gained experience.
One possibility is to treat any match against these code points as undefined. But since
Perl doesn't have the concept of a match being undefined, it converts this to failing or
"FALSE". This is almost, but not quite, what Perl did from v5.14 (when use of these code
points became generally reliable) through v5.18. The difference is that Perl treated all
"\p{}" matches as failing, but all "\P{}" matches as succeeding.
One problem with this is that it leads to unexpected, and confusting results in some
cases:
chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=True} # Failed on <= v5.18
chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=False} # Failed! on <= v5.18
That is, it treated both matches as undefined, and converted that to false (raising a
warning on each). The first case is the expected result, but the second is likely
counterintuitive: "How could both be false when they are complements?" Another problem
was that the implementation optimized many Unicode property matches down to already
existing simpler, faster operations, which don't raise the warning. We chose to not forgo
those optimizations, which help the vast majority of matches, just to generate a warning
for the unlikely event that an above-Unicode code point is being matched against.
As a result of these problems, starting in v5.20, what Perl does is to treat non-Unicode
code points as just typical unassigned Unicode characters, and matches accordingly.
(Note: Unicode has atypical unassigned code points. For example, it has noncharacter code
points, and ones that, when they do get assigned, are destined to be written Right-to-
left, as Arabic and Hebrew are. Perl assumes that no non-Unicode code point has any
atypical properties.)
Perl, in most cases, will raise a warning when matching an above-Unicode code point
against a Unicode property when the result is "TRUE" for "\p{}", and "FALSE" for "\P{}".
For example:
chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=True} # Fails, no warning
chr(0x110000) =~ \p{ASCII_Hex_Digit=False} # Succeeds, with warning
In both these examples, the character being matched is non-Unicode, so Unicode doesn't
define how it should match. It clearly isn't an ASCII hex digit, so the first example
clearly should fail, and so it does, with no warning. But it is arguable that the second
example should have an undefined, hence "FALSE", result. So a warning is raised for it.
Thus the warning is raised for many fewer cases than in earlier Perls, and only when what
the result is could be arguable. It turns out that none of the optimizations made by Perl
(or are ever likely to be made) cause the warning to be skipped, so it solves both
problems of Perl's earlier approach. The most commonly used property that is affected by
this change is "\p{Unassigned}" which is a short form for
"\p{General_Category=Unassigned}". Starting in v5.20, all non-Unicode code points are
considered "Unassigned". In earlier releases the matches failed because the result was
considered undefined.
The only place where the warning is not raised when it might ought to have been is if
optimizations cause the whole pattern match to not even be attempted. For example, Perl
may figure out that for a string to match a certain regular expression pattern, the string
has to contain the substring "foobar". Before attempting the match, Perl may look for
that substring, and if not found, immediately fail the match without actually trying it;
so no warning gets generated even if the string contains an above-Unicode code point.
This behavior is more "Do what I mean" than in earlier Perls for most applications. But
it catches fewer issues for code that needs to be strictly Unicode compliant. Therefore
there is an additional mode of operation available to accommodate such code. This mode is
enabled if a regular expression pattern is compiled within the lexical scope where the
"non_unicode" warning class has been made fatal, say by:
use warnings FATAL => "non_unicode"
(see warnings). In this mode of operation, Perl will raise the warning for all matches
against a non-Unicode code point (not just the arguable ones), and it skips the
optimizations that might cause the warning to not be output. (It currently still won't
warn if the match isn't even attempted, like in the "foobar" example above.)
In summary, Perl now normally treats non-Unicode code points as typical Unicode unassigned
code points for regular expression matches, raising a warning only when it is arguable
what the result should be. However, if this warning has been made fatal, it isn't
skipped.
There is one exception to all this. "\p{All}" looks like a Unicode property, but it is a
Perl extension that is defined to be true for all possible code points, Unicode or not, so
no warning is ever generated when matching this against a non-Unicode code point. (Prior
to v5.20, it was an exact synonym for "\p{Any}", matching code points 0 through 0x10FFFF.)
Security Implications of Unicode
First, read Unicode Security Considerations <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr36>.
Also, note the following:
• Malformed UTF-8
Unfortunately, the original specification of UTF-8 leaves some room for interpretation
of how many bytes of encoded output one should generate from one input Unicode
character. Strictly speaking, the shortest possible sequence of UTF-8 bytes should be
generated, because otherwise there is potential for an input buffer overflow at the
receiving end of a UTF-8 connection. Perl always generates the shortest length UTF-8,
and with warnings on, Perl will warn about non-shortest length UTF-8 along with other
malformations, such as the surrogates, which are not Unicode code points valid for
interchange.
• Regular expression pattern matching may surprise you if you're not accustomed to
Unicode. Starting in Perl 5.14, several pattern modifiers are available to control
this, called the character set modifiers. Details are given in "Character set
modifiers" in perlre.
As discussed elsewhere, Perl has one foot (two hooves?) planted in each of two worlds: the
old world of ASCII and single-byte locales, and the new world of Unicode, upgrading when
necessary. If your legacy code does not explicitly use Unicode, no automatic switch-over
to Unicode should happen.
Unicode in Perl on EBCDIC
Unicode is supported on EBCDIC platforms. See perlebcdic.
Unless ASCII vs. EBCDIC issues are specifically being discussed, references to UTF-8
encoding in this document and elsewhere should be read as meaning UTF-EBCDIC on EBCDIC
platforms. See "Unicode and UTF" in perlebcdic.
Because UTF-EBCDIC is so similar to UTF-8, the differences are mostly hidden from you;
"use utf8" (and NOT something like "use utfebcdic") declares the the script is in the
platform's "native" 8-bit encoding of Unicode. (Similarly for the ":utf8" layer.)
Locales
See "Unicode and UTF-8" in perllocale
When Unicode Does Not Happen
There are still many places where Unicode (in some encoding or another) could be given as
arguments or received as results, or both in Perl, but it is not, in spite of Perl having
extensive ways to input and output in Unicode, and a few other "entry points" like the
@ARGV array (which can sometimes be interpreted as UTF-8).
The following are such interfaces. Also, see "The "Unicode Bug"". For all of these
interfaces Perl currently (as of v5.16.0) simply assumes byte strings both as arguments
and results, or UTF-8 strings if the (deprecated) "encoding" pragma has been used.
One reason that Perl does not attempt to resolve the role of Unicode in these situations
is that the answers are highly dependent on the operating system and the file system(s).
For example, whether filenames can be in Unicode and in exactly what kind of encoding, is
not exactly a portable concept. Similarly for "qx" and "system": how well will the
"command-line interface" (and which of them?) handle Unicode?
• "chdir", "chmod", "chown", "chroot", "exec", "link", "lstat", "mkdir", "rename",
"rmdir", "stat", "symlink", "truncate", "unlink", "utime", "-X"
• %ENV
• "glob" (aka the "<*>")
• "open", "opendir", "sysopen"
• "qx" (aka the backtick operator), "system"
• "readdir", "readlink"
The "Unicode Bug"
The term, "Unicode bug" has been applied to an inconsistency with the code points in the
"Latin-1 Supplement" block, that is, between 128 and 255. Without a locale specified,
unlike all other characters or code points, these characters can have very different
semantics depending on the rules in effect. (Characters whose code points are above 255
force Unicode rules; whereas the rules for ASCII characters are the same under both ASCII
and Unicode rules.)
Under Unicode rules, these upper-Latin1 characters are interpreted as Unicode code points,
which means they have the same semantics as Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and C1 controls.
As explained in "ASCII Rules versus Unicode Rules", under ASCII rules, they are considered
to be unassigned characters.
This can lead to unexpected results. For example, a string's semantics can suddenly
change if a code point above 255 is appended to it, which changes the rules from ASCII to
Unicode. As an example, consider the following program and its output:
$ perl -le'
no feature 'unicode_strings';
$s1 = "\xC2";
$s2 = "\x{2660}";
for ($s1, $s2, $s1.$s2) {
print /\w/ || 0;
}
'
0
0
1
If there's no "\w" in "s1" nor in "s2", why does their concatenation have one?
This anomaly stems from Perl's attempt to not disturb older programs that didn't use
Unicode, along with Perl's desire to add Unicode support seamlessly. But the result
turned out to not be seamless. (By the way, you can choose to be warned when things like
this happen. See "encoding::warnings".)
"use feature 'unicode_strings'" was added, starting in Perl v5.12, to address this
problem. It affects these things:
• Changing the case of a scalar, that is, using "uc()", "ucfirst()", "lc()", and
"lcfirst()", or "\L", "\U", "\u" and "\l" in double-quotish contexts, such as regular
expression substitutions.
Under "unicode_strings" starting in Perl 5.12.0, Unicode rules are generally used.
See "lc" in perlfunc for details on how this works in combination with various other
pragmas.
• Using caseless ("/i") regular expression matching.
Starting in Perl 5.14.0, regular expressions compiled within the scope of
"unicode_strings" use Unicode rules even when executed or compiled into larger regular
expressions outside the scope.
• Matching any of several properties in regular expressions.
These properties are "\b" (without braces), "\B" (without braces), "\s", "\S", "\w",
"\W", and all the Posix character classes except "[[:ascii:]]".
Starting in Perl 5.14.0, regular expressions compiled within the scope of
"unicode_strings" use Unicode rules even when executed or compiled into larger regular
expressions outside the scope.
• In "quotemeta" or its inline equivalent "\Q".
Starting in Perl 5.16.0, consistent quoting rules are used within the scope of
"unicode_strings", as described in "quotemeta" in perlfunc. Prior to that, or outside
its scope, no code points above 127 are quoted in UTF-8 encoded strings, but in byte
encoded strings, code points between 128-255 are always quoted.
You can see from the above that the effect of "unicode_strings" increased over several
Perl releases. (And Perl's support for Unicode continues to improve; it's best to use the
latest available release in order to get the most complete and accurate results possible.)
Note that "unicode_strings" is automatically chosen if you "use 5.012" or higher.
For Perls earlier than those described above, or when a string is passed to a function
outside the scope of "unicode_strings", see the next section.
Forcing Unicode in Perl (Or Unforcing Unicode in Perl)
Sometimes (see "When Unicode Does Not Happen" or "The "Unicode Bug"") there are situations
where you simply need to force a byte string into UTF-8, or vice versa. The standard
module Encode can be used for this, or the low-level calls "utf8::upgrade($bytestring)"
and "utf8::downgrade($utf8string[, FAIL_OK])".
Note that "utf8::downgrade()" can fail if the string contains characters that don't fit
into a byte.
Calling either function on a string that already is in the desired state is a no-op.
"ASCII Rules versus Unicode Rules" gives all the ways that a string is made to use Unicode
rules.
Using Unicode in XS
See "Unicode Support" in perlguts for an introduction to Unicode at the XS level, and
"Unicode Support" in perlapi for the API details.
Hacking Perl to work on earlier Unicode versions (for very serious hackers only)
Perl by default comes with the latest supported Unicode version built-in, but the goal is
to allow you to change to use any earlier one. In Perls v5.20 and v5.22, however, the
earliest usable version is Unicode 5.1. Perl v5.18 is able to handle all earlier
versions.
Download the files in the desired version of Unicode from the Unicode web site
<http://www.unicode.org>). These should replace the existing files in lib/unicore in the
Perl source tree. Follow the instructions in README.perl in that directory to change some
of their names, and then build perl (see INSTALL).
Porting code from perl-5.6.X
Perls starting in 5.8 have a different Unicode model from 5.6. In 5.6 the programmer was
required to use the "utf8" pragma to declare that a given scope expected to deal with
Unicode data and had to make sure that only Unicode data were reaching that scope. If you
have code that is working with 5.6, you will need some of the following adjustments to
your code. The examples are written such that the code will continue to work under 5.6, so
you should be safe to try them out.
• A filehandle that should read or write UTF-8
if ($] > 5.008) {
binmode $fh, ":encoding(utf8)";
}
• A scalar that is going to be passed to some extension
Be it "Compress::Zlib", "Apache::Request" or any extension that has no mention of
Unicode in the manpage, you need to make sure that the UTF8 flag is stripped off. Note
that at the time of this writing (January 2012) the mentioned modules are not
UTF-8-aware. Please check the documentation to verify if this is still true.
if ($] > 5.008) {
require Encode;
$val = Encode::encode_utf8($val); # make octets
}
• A scalar we got back from an extension
If you believe the scalar comes back as UTF-8, you will most likely want the UTF8 flag
restored:
if ($] > 5.008) {
require Encode;
$val = Encode::decode_utf8($val);
}
• Same thing, if you are really sure it is UTF-8
if ($] > 5.008) {
require Encode;
Encode::_utf8_on($val);
}
• A wrapper for DBI "fetchrow_array" and "fetchrow_hashref"
When the database contains only UTF-8, a wrapper function or method is a convenient way
to replace all your "fetchrow_array" and "fetchrow_hashref" calls. A wrapper function
will also make it easier to adapt to future enhancements in your database driver. Note
that at the time of this writing (January 2012), the DBI has no standardized way to
deal with UTF-8 data. Please check the DBI documentation to verify if that is still
true.
sub fetchrow {
# $what is one of fetchrow_{array,hashref}
my($self, $sth, $what) = @_;
if ($] < 5.008) {
return $sth->$what;
} else {
require Encode;
if (wantarray) {
my @arr = $sth->$what;
for (@arr) {
defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_);
}
return @arr;
} else {
my $ret = $sth->$what;
if (ref $ret) {
for my $k (keys %$ret) {
defined
&& /[^\000-\177]/
&& Encode::_utf8_on($_) for $ret->{$k};
}
return $ret;
} else {
defined && /[^\000-\177]/ && Encode::_utf8_on($_) for $ret;
return $ret;
}
}
}
}
• A large scalar that you know can only contain ASCII
Scalars that contain only ASCII and are marked as UTF-8 are sometimes a drag to your
program. If you recognize such a situation, just remove the UTF8 flag:
utf8::downgrade($val) if $] > 5.008;
BUGS
See also "The "Unicode Bug"" above.
Interaction with Extensions
When Perl exchanges data with an extension, the extension should be able to understand the
UTF8 flag and act accordingly. If the extension doesn't recognize that flag, it's likely
that the extension will return incorrectly-flagged data.
So if you're working with Unicode data, consult the documentation of every module you're
using if there are any issues with Unicode data exchange. If the documentation does not
talk about Unicode at all, suspect the worst and probably look at the source to learn how
the module is implemented. Modules written completely in Perl shouldn't cause problems.
Modules that directly or indirectly access code written in other programming languages are
at risk.
For affected functions, the simple strategy to avoid data corruption is to always make the
encoding of the exchanged data explicit. Choose an encoding that you know the extension
can handle. Convert arguments passed to the extensions to that encoding and convert
results back from that encoding. Write wrapper functions that do the conversions for you,
so you can later change the functions when the extension catches up.
To provide an example, let's say the popular "Foo::Bar::escape_html" function doesn't deal
with Unicode data yet. The wrapper function would convert the argument to raw UTF-8 and
convert the result back to Perl's internal representation like so:
sub my_escape_html ($) {
my($what) = shift;
return unless defined $what;
Encode::decode_utf8(Foo::Bar::escape_html(
Encode::encode_utf8($what)));
}
Sometimes, when the extension does not convert data but just stores and retrieves it, you
will be able to use the otherwise dangerous "Encode::_utf8_on()" function. Let's say the
popular "Foo::Bar" extension, written in C, provides a "param" method that lets you store
and retrieve data according to these prototypes:
$self->param($name, $value); # set a scalar
$value = $self->param($name); # retrieve a scalar
If it does not yet provide support for any encoding, one could write a derived class with
such a "param" method:
sub param {
my($self,$name,$value) = @_;
utf8::upgrade($name); # make sure it is UTF-8 encoded
if (defined $value) {
utf8::upgrade($value); # make sure it is UTF-8 encoded
return $self->SUPER::param($name,$value);
} else {
my $ret = $self->SUPER::param($name);
Encode::_utf8_on($ret); # we know, it is UTF-8 encoded
return $ret;
}
}
Some extensions provide filters on data entry/exit points, such as
"DB_File::filter_store_key" and family. Look out for such filters in the documentation of
your extensions; they can make the transition to Unicode data much easier.
Speed
Some functions are slower when working on UTF-8 encoded strings than on byte encoded
strings. All functions that need to hop over characters such as "length()", "substr()" or
"index()", or matching regular expressions can work much faster when the underlying data
are byte-encoded.
In Perl 5.8.0 the slowness was often quite spectacular; in Perl 5.8.1 a caching scheme was
introduced which improved the situation. In general, operations with UTF-8 encoded
strings are still slower. As an example, the Unicode properties (character classes) like
"\p{Nd}" are known to be quite a bit slower (5-20 times) than their simpler counterparts
like "[0-9]" (then again, there are hundreds of Unicode characters matching "Nd" compared
with the 10 ASCII characters matching "[0-9]").
SEE ALSO
perlunitut, perluniintro, perluniprops, Encode, open, utf8, bytes, perlretut,
"${^UNICODE}" in perlvar, <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44>).