Text::Unidecode(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				      Text::Unidecode(3pm)

NAME

       Text::Unidecode -- US-ASCII transliterations of Unicode text

SYNOPSIS

	 use utf8;
	 use Text::Unidecode;
	 print unidecode(
	   "x{5317}x{4EB0}
"
	    # those are the Chinese characters for Beijing
	 );

	 # That prints: Bei Jing

DESCRIPTION

       It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a
       user via an application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need aren't accessible.  You could represent the Unicode
       characters as "???????" or "15BA15A01610...", but that's nearly useless to the user who actually wants to read what the text says.

       What Text::Unidecode provides is a function, "unidecode(...)" that takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in US-ASCII characters
       (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F).  The representation is almost always an attempt at transliteration --
       i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system.  (See the example in the synop-
       sis.)

       Unidecode's ability to transliterate is limited by two factors:

       * The amount and quality of data in the original
	   So if you have Hebrew data that has no vowel points in it, then Unidecode cannot guess what vowels should appear in a pronounciation.
	   S f y hv n vwls n th npt, y wn't gt ny vwls n th tpt.  (This is a specific application of the general principle of "Garbage In, Garbage
	   Out".)

       * Basic limitations in the Unidecode design
	   Writing a real and clever transliteration algorithm for any single language usually requires a lot of time, and at least a passable
	   knowledge of the language involved.	But Unicode text can convey more languages than I could possibly learn (much less create a
	   transliterator for) in the entire rest of my lifetime.  So I put a cap on how intelligent Unidecode could be, by insisting that it sup-
	   port only context-insensitive transliteration.  That means missing the finer details of any given writing system, while still hopefully
	   being useful.

       Unidecode, in other words, is quick and dirty.  Sometimes the output is not so dirty at all: Russian and Greek seem to work passably; and
       while Thaana (Divehi, AKA Maldivian) is a definitely non-Western writing system, setting up a mapping from it to Roman letters seems to
       work pretty well.  But sometimes the output is very dirty: Unidecode does quite badly on Japanese and Thai.

       If you want a smarter transliteration for a particular language than Unidecode provides, then you should look for (or write) a translitera-
       tion algorithm specific to that language, and apply it instead of (or at least before) applying Unidecode.

       In other words, Unidecode's approach is broad (knowing about dozens of writing systems), but shallow (not being meticulous about any of
       them).

FUNCTIONS

       Text::Unidecode provides one function, "unidecode(...)", which is exported by default.  It can be used in a variety of calling contexts:

       "$out = unidecode($in);" # scalar context
	   This returns a copy of $in, transliterated.

       "$out = unidecode(@in);" # scalar context
	   This is the same as "$out = unidecode(join '', @in);"

       "@out = unidecode(@in);" # list context
	   This returns a list consisting of copies of @in, each transliterated.  This is the same as "@out = map scalar(unidecode($_)), @in;"

       "unidecode(@items);" # void context
       "unidecode(@bar, $foo, @baz);" # void context
	   Each item on input is replaced with its transliteration.  This is the same as "for(@bar, $foo, @baz) { $_ = unidecode($_) }"

       You should make a minimum of assumptions about the output of "unidecode(...)".  For example, if you assume an all-alphabetic (Unicode)
       string passed to "unidecode(...)" will return an all-alphabetic string, you're wrong -- some alphabetic Unicode characters are transliter-
       ated as strings containing punctuation (e.g., the Armenian letter at 0x0539 currently transliterates as "T`".

       However, these are the assumptions you can make:

       o   Each character 0x0000 - 0x007F transliterates as itself.  That is, "unidecode(...)" is 7-bit pure.

       o   The output of "unidecode(...)" always consists entirely of US-ASCII characters -- i.e., characters 0x0000 - 0x007F.

       o   All Unicode characters translate to a sequence of (any number of) characters that are newline ("
") or in the range 0x0020-0x007E.
	   That is, no Unicode character translates to "x01", for example.  (Altho if you have a "x01" on input, you'll get a "x01" in output.)

       o   Yes, some transliterations produce a "
" -- but just a few, and only with good reason.  Note that the value of newline ("
") varies
	   from platform to platform -- see "perlport" in perlport.

       o   Some Unicode characters may transliterate to nothing (i.e., empty string).

       o   Very many Unicode characters transliterate to multi-character sequences.  E.g., Han character 0x5317 transliterates as the four-charac-
	   ter string "Bei ".

       o   Within these constraints, I may change the transliteration of characters in future versions.  For example, if someone convinces me that
	   the Armenian letter at 0x0539, currently transliterated as "T`", would be better transliterated as "D", I may well make that change.

DESIGN GOALS AND CONSTRAINTS

       Text::Unidecode is meant to be a transliterator-of-last resort, to be used once you've decided that you can't just display the Unicode data
       as is, and once you've decided you don't have a more clever, language-specific transliterator available.  It transliterates context-insen-
       sitively -- that is, a given character is replaced with the same US-ASCII (7-bit ASCII) character or characters, no matter what the sur-
       rounding character are.

       The main reason I'm making Text::Unidecode work with only context-insensitive substitution is that it's fast, dumb, and straightforward
       enough to be feasable.  It doesn't tax my (quite limited) knowledge of world languages.	It doesn't require me writing a hundred lines of
       code to get the Thai syllabification right (and never knowing whether I've gotten it wrong, because I don't know Thai), or spending a year
       trying to get Text::Unidecode to use the ChaSen algorithm for Japanese, or trying to write heuristics for telling the difference between
       Japanese, Chinese, or Korean, so it knows how to transliterate any given Uni-Han glyph.	And moreover, context-insensitive substitution is
       still mostly useful, but still clearly couldn't be mistaken for authoritative.

       Text::Unidecode is an example of the 80/20 rule in action -- you get 80% of the usefulness using just 20% of a "real" solution.

       A "real" approach to transliteration for any given language can involve such increasingly tricky contextual factors as these

       The previous / preceding character(s)
	   What a given symbol "X" means, could depend on whether it's followed by a consonant, or by vowel, or by some diacritic character.

       Syllables
	   A character "X" at end of a syllable could mean something different from when it's at the start -- which is especially problematic when
	   the language involved doesn't explicitly mark where one syllable stops and the next starts.

       Parts of speech
	   What "X" sounds like at the end of a word, depends on whether that word is a noun, or a verb, or what.

       Meaning
	   By semantic context, you can tell that this ideogram "X" means "shoe" (pronounced one way) and not "time" (pronounced another), and
	   that's how you know to transliterate it one way instead of the other.

       Origin of the word
	   "X" means one thing in loanwords and/or placenames (and derivatives thereof), and another in native words.

       "It's just that way"
	   "X" normally makes the /X/ sound, except for this list of seventy exceptions (and words based on them, sometimes indirectly).  Or: you
	   never can tell which of the three ways to pronounce "X" this word actually uses; you just have to know which it is, so keep a dictio-
	   nary on hand!

       Language
	   The character "X" is actually used in several different languages, and you have to figure out which you're looking at before you can
	   determine how to transliterate it.

       Out of a desire to avoid being mired in any of these kinds of contextual factors, I chose to exclude all of them and just stick with con-
       text-insensitive replacement.

TODO

       Things that need tending to are detailed in the TODO.txt file, included in this distribution.  Normal installs probably don't leave the
       TODO.txt lying around, but if nothing else, you can see it at http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Text::Unidecode

MOTTO

       The Text::Unidecode motto is:

	 It's better than nothing!

       ...in both meanings: 1) seeing the output of "unidecode(...)" is better than just having all font-unavailable Unicode characters replaced
       with "?"'s, or rendered as gibberish; and 2) it's the worst, i.e., there's nothing that Text::Unidecode's algorithm is better than.

CAVEATS

       If you get really implausible nonsense out of "unidecode(...)", make sure that the input data really is a utf8 string.  See "perlunicode"
       in perlunicode.

THANKS

       Thanks to Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Abhijit Menon-Sen, and Mark-Jason Dominus.

SEE ALSO

       Unicode Consortium: http://www.unicode.org/

       Geoffrey Sampson.  1990.  Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction.  ISBN: 0804717567

       Randall K. Barry (editor).  1997.  ALA-LC Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts.  ISBN: 0844409405 [ALA is the
       American Library Association; LC is the Library of Congress.]

       Rupert Snell.  2000.  Beginner's Hindi Script (Teach Yourself Books).  ISBN: 0658009109

COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMERS

       Copyright (c) 2001 Sean M. Burke. All rights reserved.

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

       This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of mer-
       chantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

       Much of Text::Unidecode's internal data is based on data from The Unicode Consortium, with which I am unafiliated.

AUTHOR

       Sean M. Burke "sburke@cpan.org"

perl v5.8.8							    2008-03-01						      Text::Unidecode(3pm)