NAME

Unicode::String - String of Unicode characters (UCS2/UTF16)

SYNOPSIS

use Unicode::String qw(utf8 latin1 utf16);
$u = utf8("The Unicode Standard is a fixed-width, uniform ");
$u .= utf8("encoding scheme for written characters and text");

# convert to various external formats
print $u->ucs4;      # 4 byte characters
print $u->utf16;     # 2 byte characters + surrogates
print $u->utf8;      # 1-4 byte characters
print $u->utf7;      # 7-bit clean format
print $u->latin1;    # lossy
print $u->hex;       # a hexadecimal string

# all these can be used to set string value or as constructor
$u->latin1("Å være eller å ikke være");
$u = utf16("\0Å\0 \0v\0æ\0r\0e");

# string operations
$u2 = $u->copy;
$u->append($u2);
$u->repeat(2);
$u->chop;

$u->length;
$u->index($other);
$u->index($other, $pos);

$u->substr($offset);
$u->substr($offset, $length);
$u->substr($offset, $length, $substitute);

# overloading
$u .= "more";
$u = $u x 100;
print "$u\n";

# string <--> array of numbers
@array = $u->unpack;
$u->pack(@array);

# misc
$u->ord;
$u = uchr($num);

DESCRIPTION

A Unicode::String object represents a sequence of Unicode characters. The Unicode Standard is a fixed-width, uniform encoding scheme for written charaters and text. This encoding treats alphabetic characters, ideographic characters, and symbols identically, which means that they can be used in any mixture and with equal facility. Unicode is modeled on the ASCII character set, but uses a 16-bit encoding to support full multilingual text.

Internally a Unicode::String object is a string of 2 byte values in network byte order (big-endian). The class provide various methods to convert from and to various external formats (ucs4 / utf16 / utf8 / utf7 / latin1 / hex). All string manipulations are made on strings in this the internal 16-bit format.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 1997 Gisle Aas.

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