These are experimental modules to handle various Unicode issues.  This
is software under construction.  Not even alpha state right now.

More information on Unicode can be found at http://www.unicode.org

Current modules are:

  Unicode::String   - represent strings of Unicode chars.
  Unicode::CharName - look up character names


Some of my plans for the Unicode modules are:

   - Internal representation should be 2-byte-big-endian in normal
     perl strings.  Blessed scalars as 'Unicode::String'.

   - Unicode version 2.0 based.

   - Fast XS implementation of Unicode encodings (UTF-7/UTF-8/UTF-16/UCS4)
     Fast encoding/decoding to 8-bit char sets.

   - Composition/decomposition support

   - Case convertions (lc, uc, ucfirst)  last one should use title-case
   
   - Fast lookup of Unicode attributes (unidata lookup using XS)

   - Unicode filehandles (automatic convertion from UTF-7/UTF-8/8-bit 
     char set when reading,writing to filehandles)


The following are examples of use:

   use Unicode::String qw(latin1 utf8);

   $u = utf8("this is a string\n");
   print $u->utf16;
   print $u->utf8;
   print $u->latin1;
   print $u->hex;

   print latin1("naïve\n")->utf8;

   use Unicode::CharName qw(uname);
   print uname(ord('$')), "\n";



COPYRIGHT

  © 1997 Gisle Aas. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.