Section 6.7. Conclusion

6.7. Conclusion

Perl's Unicode support has developed slowly and steadily over the past few versions, but it is now at a point where one can write major programs with core Unicode components. Hopefully this chapter has shown you some of the things that Perl's Unicode support can allow you to do and how deploying Unicode can save a lot of hassle with alternate character repertoires.

We've looked at the differences between Unicode and legacy encodings, and the various different UTF encodings. As we have noted, Perl speaks UTF-8 internally but tries hard to allow users to use Unicode features without knowing anything about the internal representation.

Perl's support for Unicode extends to distinguishing between character and byte semantics, providing Unicode character escapes and names, and transcoding modules to allow easy input of legacy data.

We've also seen what to do if Unicode doesn't behave as you might expect, and how to convert old XS code to support Unicode data.