CONTENTS

• NAME
• SYNOPSIS
  • Table of Contents
• DESCRIPTION
  • TERMINOLOGY
    • character
    • byte
    • octet
• THE PERL ENCODING API
  • Basic methods
    • encode
    • decode
    • find_encoding
    • find_mime_encoding
    • from_to
    • encode_utf8
    • decode_utf8
  • Listing available encodings
  • Defining Aliases
  • Finding IANA Character Set Registry names
• Encoding via PerlIO
• Handling Malformed Data
  • List of CHECK values
    • FB_DEFAULT
    • FB_CROAK
    • FB_QUIET
    • FB_WARN
    • FB_PERLQQ FB_HTMLCREF FB_XMLCREF
    • The bitmask
    • LEAVE_SRC
  • coderef for CHECK
• Defining Encodings
• The UTF8 flag
  • Messing with Perl's Internals
    • is_utf8
    • _utf8_on
    • _utf8_off
• UTF-8 vs. utf8 vs. UTF8
• SEE ALSO
• MAINTAINER
• COPYRIGHT

#NAME

Encode - character encodings in Perl

#SYNOPSIS

use Encode qw(decode encode);
$characters = decode('UTF-8', $octets,     Encode::FB_CROAK);
$octets     = encode('UTF-8', $characters, Encode::FB_CROAK);

#Table of Contents

Encode consists of a collection of modules whose details are too extensive to fit in one document. This one itself explains the top-level APIs and general topics at a glance. For other topics and more details, see the documentation for these modules:

#Encode::Alias - Alias definitions to encodings

#Encode::Encoding - Encode Implementation Base Class

#Encode::Supported - List of Supported Encodings

#Encode::CN - Simplified Chinese Encodings

#Encode::JP - Japanese Encodings

#Encode::KR - Korean Encodings

#Encode::TW - Traditional Chinese Encodings

#DESCRIPTION

The Encode module provides the interface between Perl strings and the rest of the system. Perl strings are sequences of characters.

The repertoire of characters that Perl can represent is a superset of those defined by the Unicode Consortium. On most platforms the ordinal values of a character as returned by ord(S) is the Unicode codepoint for that character. The exceptions are platforms where the legacy encoding is some variant of EBCDIC rather than a superset of ASCII; see perlebcdic.

During recent history, data is moved around a computer in 8-bit chunks, often called "bytes" but also known as "octets" in standards documents. Perl is widely used to manipulate data of many types: not only strings of characters representing human or computer languages, but also "binary" data, being the machine's representation of numbers, pixels in an image, or just about anything.

When Perl is processing "binary data", the programmer wants Perl to process "sequences of bytes". This is not a problem for Perl: because a byte has 256 possible values, it easily fits in Perl's much larger "logical character".

This document mostly explains the how. perlunitut and perlunifaq explain the why.

#TERMINOLOGY

#character

A character in the range 0 .. 2**32-1 (or more); what Perl's strings are made of.

#byte

A character in the range 0..255; a special case of a Perl character.