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Postings from May 2008
Marc Lehmann wrote: > >>> part of the codebase) assuming this is just an internal flag, >>> as originally designed, will kill perl in the long run. >>> >> The end of the world is near, eh? >> > > I meet a lot of people who would like to use unicode in perl, but fail to do > so because they run intot he problems mentioned and claim it should be much > easier (yes, it should, and certainly less random). > </lurk> Just to throw in some more user experience - I'm very happy with perl's utf8 implementation. I implemented utf8 handling in a large mod_perl application last year. I knew nothing about unicode beforehand, read up, pored over the relevant man pages and was very happy with the results. The worst that happens is my code warns about wide characters or invalid utf8 in input files, but the default settings handle everything quite gracefully. Perhaps it's 20 years of coding experience but I didn't find the utf8 flag difficult to work with - I've never had to touch a Devel::* module and I couldn't tell you what a dump of an SV looks like - all I use for utf8 manipulation is: use utf8; (I ignore the advice on the man page and use it everywhere, so constant strings have the flag set) encode_utf8, decode_utf8 (allowing me to force the flag either way and detect failures) open($fh, "<:utf8", $file) The only thing I'd consider a 'gotcha' is that for an easy life you either implement utf8 accross the whole application, or you don't implement it - but that's common sense really. perl++ John