Encode::Unicode(3pm)					 Perl Programmers Reference Guide				      Encode::Unicode(3pm)

NAME

       Encode::Unicode -- Various Unicode Transformation Formats

SYNOPSIS

	   use Encode qw/encode decode/;
	   $ucs2 = encode("UCS-2BE", $utf8);
	   $utf8 = decode("UCS-2BE", $ucs2);

ABSTRACT

       This module implements all Character Encoding Schemes of Unicode that are officially documented by Unicode Consortium (except, of course,
       for UTF-8, which is a native format in perl).

       <http://www.unicode.org/glossary/> says:
	   Character Encoding Scheme A character encoding form plus byte serialization. There are seven character encoding schemes in Unicode:
	   UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32 (UCS-4), UTF-32BE (UCS-4BE) and UTF-32LE (UCS-4LE).

       Quick Reference
			   Decodes from ord(N)		 Encodes chr(N) to...
		  octet/char BOM S.P d800-dfff	ord > 0xffff	 x{1abcd} ==
	     ---------------+-----------------+------------------------------
	     UCS-2BE	   2   N   N  is bogus			Not Available
	     UCS-2LE	   2   N   N	 bogus			Not Available
	     UTF-16	 2/4   Y   Y  is   S.P		 S.P		BE/LE
	     UTF-16BE	 2/4   N   Y	   S.P		 S.P	0xd82a,0xdfcd
	     UTF-16LE	   2   N   Y	   S.P		 S.P	0x2ad8,0xcddf
	     UTF-32	   4   Y   -  is bogus	       As is		BE/LE
	     UTF-32BE	   4   N   -	 bogus	       As is	   0x0001abcd
	     UTF-32LE	   4   N   -	 bogus	       As is	   0xcdab0100
	     UTF-8	 1-4   -   -	 bogus	 >= 4 octets   xf0x9aaf8d
	     ---------------+-----------------+------------------------------

Size, Endianness, and BOM
       You can categorize these CES by 3 criteria:  size of each character, endianness, and Byte Order Mark.

       by size

       UCS-2 is a fixed-length encoding with each character taking 16 bits.  It does not support surrogate pairs.  When a surrogate pair is
       encountered during decode(), its place is filled with x{FFFD} if CHECK is 0, or the routine croaks if CHECK is 1.  When a character whose
       ord value is larger than 0xFFFF is encountered, its place is filled with x{FFFD} if CHECK is 0, or the routine croaks if CHECK is 1.

       UTF-16 is almost the same as UCS-2 but it supports surrogate pairs.  When it encounters a high surrogate (0xD800-0xDBFF), it fetches the
       following low surrogate (0xDC00-0xDFFF) and "desurrogate"s them to form a character.  Bogus surrogates result in death.	When x{10000} or
       above is encountered during encode(), it "ensurrogate"s them and pushes the surrogate pair to the output stream.

       UTF-32 (UCS-4) is a fixed-length encoding with each character taking 32 bits.  Since it is 32-bit, there is no need for surrogate pairs.

       by endianness

       The first (and now failed) goal of Unicode was to map all character repertoires into a fixed-length integer so that programmers are happy.
       Since each character is either a short or long in C, you have to pay attention to the endianness of each platform when you pass data to one
       another.

       Anything marked as BE is Big Endian (or network byte order) and LE is Little Endian (aka VAX byte order).  For anything not marked either
       BE or LE, a character called Byte Order Mark (BOM) indicating the endianness is prepended to the string.

       BOM as integer when fetched in network byte order
			 16	    32 bits/char
	     -------------------------
	     BE      0xFeFF 0x0000FeFF
	     LE      0xFFeF 0xFFFe0000
	     -------------------------

       This modules handles the BOM as follows.

       o   When BE or LE is explicitly stated as the name of encoding, BOM is simply treated as a normal character (ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE).

       o   When BE or LE is omitted during decode(), it checks if BOM is at the beginning of the string; if one is found, the endianness is set to
	   what the BOM says.  If no BOM is found, the routine dies.

       o   When BE or LE is omitted during encode(), it returns a BE-encoded string with BOM prepended.  So when you want to encode a whole text
	   file, make sure you encode() the whole text at once, not line by line or each line, not file, will have a BOM prepended.

       o   "UCS-2" is an exception.  Unlike others, this is an alias of UCS-2BE.  UCS-2 is already registered by IANA and others that way.

Surrogate Pairs
       To say the least, surrogate pairs were the biggest mistake of the Unicode Consortium.  But according to the late Douglas Adams in The
       Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been
       widely regarded as a bad move".	Their mistake was not of this magnitude so let's forgive them.

       (I don't dare make any comparison with Unicode Consortium and the Vogons here ;)  Or, comparing Encode to Babel Fish is completely appro-
       priate -- if you can only stick this into your ear :)

       Surrogate pairs were born when the Unicode Consortium finally admitted that 16 bits were not big enough to hold all the world's character
       repertoires.  But they already made UCS-2 16-bit.  What do we do?

       Back then, the range 0xD800-0xDFFF was not allocated.  Let's split that range in half and use the first half to represent the "upper half
       of a character" and the second half to represent the "lower half of a character".  That way, you can represent 1024 * 1024 = 1048576 more
       characters.  Now we can store character ranges up to x{10ffff} even with 16-bit encodings.  This pair of half-character is now called a
       surrogate pair and UTF-16 is the name of the encoding that embraces them.

       Here is a formula to ensurrogate a Unicode character x{10000} and above;

	 $hi = ($uni - 0x10000) / 0x400 + 0xD800;
	 $lo = ($uni - 0x10000) % 0x400 + 0xDC00;

       And to desurrogate;

	$uni = 0x10000 + ($hi - 0xD800) * 0x400 + ($lo - 0xDC00);

       Note this move has made x{D800}-x{DFFF} into a forbidden zone but perl does not prohibit the use of characters within this range.  To
       perl, every one of x{0000_0000} up to x{ffff_ffff} (*) is a character.

	 (*) or x{ffff_ffff_ffff_ffff} if your perl is compiled with 64-bit
	 integer support!

SEE ALSO

       Encode, <http://www.unicode.org/glossary/>, <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/utf_bom.html>,

       RFC 2781 <http://rfc.net/rfc2781.html>,

       The whole Unicode standard <http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/u2.html>

       Ch. 15, pp. 403 of "Programming Perl (3rd Edition)" by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant; O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN 0-596-00027-8

perl v5.8.0							    2002-06-01						      Encode::Unicode(3pm)