NAME

Search::Tools::Transliterate - transliterations of UTF-8 chars

SYNOPSIS

my $tr = Search::Tools::Transliterate->new();
print $tr->convert( 'some string of utf8 chars' );

DESCRIPTION

Search::Tools::Transliterate transliterates UTF-8 characters to single-byte equivalents. It is based on the transmap project by Markus Kuhn http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/.

NOTE: All the is_* encoding check methods that existed in this class prior to version 0.05 were moved to Search::Tools::UTF8 and refactored as functions, many using XS for speed improvements.

METHODS

new

Create new instance. Takes the following optional parameters:

map

Customize the character mapping. Should be a hashref. See map() method.

ebit

Allow convert() to use full native 8bit characters for transliterating, rather than only 7bit ASCII. The default is true (1). Set to 0 to disable. NOTE: This must be set in new(). Changing via the accessor after new() will have no effect on map().

map

Access the transliteration character map. Example:

use Search::Tools::Transliterate;
my $tr = Search::Tools::Transliterate->new;
$tr->map->{mychar} = 'my transliteration';
print $tr->convert('mychar');  # prints 'my transliteration'

NOTE: The map() method is an accessor only. You can not pass in a new map.

convert( text )

Returns UTF-8 text converted with all single bytes, transliterated according to %Map. Will croak if text is not valid UTF-8, so if in doubt, check first with is_valid_utf8() in Search::Tools::UTF8;

BUGS

You might consider the whole attempt as a bug. It's really an attempt to accomodate applications that don't support Unicode. Perhaps we shouldn't even try. But for things like curly quotes and other 'smart' punctuation, it's often helpful to render the UTF-8 character as something rather than just letting a character without a direct translation slip into the ether.

That said, if a character has no mapping (and there are plenty that do not) a single space will be used.

AUTHOR

Peter Karman perl@peknet.com

Thanks to Atomic Learning www.atomiclearning.com for sponsoring the development of this module.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2006 by Peter Karman.

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

SEE ALSO

Search::Tools::UTF8, Unicode::Map, Encode, Test::utf8