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Postings from February 2000
Gisle Aas writes:
: This patch relative to 5.5.650 makes perl do the right thing for
: literals containing hibit charactets. The follwing behaviour will
: change if you apply this patch:
:
: - a \x{} escape will not force the UTF8 flag on, unless the value
: is acutally higher than \xFF.
Good.
: - the "\xff will produce malformed UTF-8 character; use \x{ff}"
: warning is gone, since we now always do the right thing :-)
Good.
: - under 'use utf8', hibit chars that are illegal utf8 are encoded
: using utf8; basically automatically turns latin1 into utf8.
: This ensure that there will never be illegal UTF8 sequences in
: a literal string that has the UTF8 flag set.
I know I originally put in the comment, "could cvt latin-1 to utf8
here", but I'm currently thinking that if a file has utf8 mixed with
latin-1, it's probably already in serious trouble by the time it gets
to the latin-1, so it probably better croak. Especially if the
filehandle was implicitly put into utf8 mode by thinking it saw utf8
earlier, when in fact it only saw bizarre latin-1. The better approach
is to make them go back and insert "use charset 'latin-1'" or some such
at the beginning.
: - Octal escapes like \400 and \777 will actually do the right thing now.
: Previously you only got the low 8-bits.
Hmm. An argument could be made that those should be illegal, though
I don't know that I want to make it.
: But, it still looks like the \N{} support will not work as it is
: now. It never sets the UTF8 flag on the string by itself.
Well, it should resolve to a character that's either above \xFF or not,
so it seems conceptually simple. But I have to confess to not
understanding the \N code at all:
print "\N{WHITE SMILING FACE}";
produces
constant(\N{...}): %^H is not localized at - line 2, within string
Talk about obscure error messages! I think it means that \N will need
to be taught about pulling in the Unicode names by default. Previously,
I think it assumed the Unicode names would come in with a "use utf8",
but that's going away, so we need to make it the default if \N doesn't
otherwise recognize its name, I imagine.
But thanks! It's easy to sit on the sidelines and carp, but we need more
real code whackers like you.
Larry