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Postings from March 2007
Marc Lehmann skribis 2007-03-30 14:24 (+0200): > In fact, I teach a lot of people about unicode in perl. At the German Perl Workshop, I saw your unicode presentation. I don't know if this is a good representation for your teaching of unicode, but I noticed that you used utf8::encode and utf8::decode, not the similar functions from Encode.pm that are more commonly used and advised. These utf8:: in-place encode/decode functions are efficient, but using them means that the same SV changes from byte string to text sting or vice versa, which makes the code hard to follow, and any attempt to use hungarian notation in code examples impossible. Whenever I teach the Perl Unicode model, I try to call my strings $byte_string and $text_string, or similar. But utf8::decode($byte_string) makes $byte_string a text string, and utf8::encode($text_string) makes $text_string a byte string, so after these statements, the names are no longer correct. (And of course, I try not to teach people the Unicode model, because that's something that's quite internal. I try to teach the difference between text strings and byte strings, and how to use encodings (which are byte representations of text strings). I treat UTF-8 exactly the same way as KOI8-R. That helps a lot!) > If perl had the abstract model juerd dreams of and uses in day-to-day coding, without encountering ANY of the problems that you describe (only the regex engine still manages to surprise me, but that's because I'm too stubborn to utf8::upgrade explicitly). It kind of makes one wonder if this dream might be reality (and your reality a dream?) > then perl would have a very easy unicode model that boils down to > what I talked about on the perl workshop: encode/decode when doing > I/O, oherwise, enjoy. And keep text strings and byte strings separate!!!!!!!!!!!!!eleven Whenever you must mix text strings and byte strings, consider the byte strings I/O and encode/decode accordingly. So, recap: encode/decode when doing I/O, keep text strings and byte strings separate, otherwise, enjoy. -- korajn salutojn, juerd waalboer: perl hacker <juerd@juerd.nl> <http://juerd.nl/sig> convolution: ict solutions and consultancy <sales@convolution.nl> Ik vertrouw stemcomputers niet. Zie <http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/>.Thread Previous | Thread Next