Modules

  • ABCDE
  • FGHIL
  • MNOPS
  • TUX

Tools

charnames

Perl 5 version 14.0 documentation
Recently read

charnames

NAME

charnames - access to Unicode character names and named character sequences; also define character names

SYNOPSIS

  1. use charnames ':full';
  2. print "\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA} is called sigma.\n";
  3. print "\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH VERTICAL LINE BELOW}",
  4. " is an officially named sequence of two Unicode characters\n";
  5. use charnames ':short';
  6. print "\N{greek:Sigma} is an upper-case sigma.\n";
  7. use charnames qw(cyrillic greek);
  8. print "\N{sigma} is Greek sigma, and \N{be} is Cyrillic b.\n";
  9. use charnames ":full", ":alias" => {
  10. e_ACUTE => "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE",
  11. mychar => 0xE8000, # Private use area
  12. };
  13. print "\N{e_ACUTE} is a small letter e with an acute.\n";
  14. print "\\N{mychar} allows me to name private use characters.\n";
  15. use charnames ();
  16. print charnames::viacode(0x1234); # prints "ETHIOPIC SYLLABLE SEE"
  17. printf "%04X", charnames::vianame("GOTHIC LETTER AHSA"); # prints
  18. # "10330"
  19. print charnames::vianame("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A"); # prints 65 on
  20. # ASCII platforms;
  21. # 193 on EBCDIC
  22. print charnames::string_vianame("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A"); # prints "A"

DESCRIPTION

Pragma use charnames is used to gain access to the names of the Unicode characters and named character sequences, and to allow you to define your own character and character sequence names.

All forms of the pragma enable use of the following 3 functions:

All forms other than "use charnames ();" also enable the use of \N{CHARNAME} sequences to compile a Unicode character into a string, based on its name.

Note that \N{U+...}, where the ... is a hexadecimal number, also inserts a character into a string, but doesn't require the use of this pragma. The character it inserts is the one whose code point (ordinal value) is equal to the number. For example, "\N{U+263a}" is the Unicode (white background, black foreground) smiley face; it doesn't require this pragma, whereas the equivalent, "\N{WHITE SMILING FACE}" does. Also, \N{...} can mean a regex quantifier instead of a character name, when the ... is a number (or comma separated pair of numbers (see QUANTIFIERS in perlreref), and is not related to this pragma.

The charnames pragma supports arguments :full , :short , script names and customized aliases. If :full is present, for expansion of \N{CHARNAME}, the string CHARNAME is first looked up in the list of standard Unicode character names. If :short is present, and CHARNAME has the form SCRIPT:CNAME, then CNAME is looked up as a letter in script SCRIPT. If use charnames is used with script name arguments, then for \N{CHARNAME} the name CHARNAME is looked up as a letter in the given scripts (in the specified order). Customized aliases can override these, and are explained in CUSTOM ALIASES.

For lookup of CHARNAME inside a given script SCRIPTNAME this pragma looks for the names

  1. SCRIPTNAME CAPITAL LETTER CHARNAME
  2. SCRIPTNAME SMALL LETTER CHARNAME
  3. SCRIPTNAME LETTER CHARNAME

in the table of standard Unicode names. If CHARNAME is lowercase, then the CAPITAL variant is ignored, otherwise the SMALL variant is ignored.

Note that \N{...} is compile-time; it's a special form of string constant used inside double-quotish strings; this means that you cannot use variables inside the \N{...} . If you want similar run-time functionality, use charnames::string_vianame().

For the C0 and C1 control characters (U+0000..U+001F, U+0080..U+009F) there are no official Unicode names but you can use instead the ISO 6429 names (LINE FEED, ESCAPE, and so forth, and their abbreviations, LF, ESC, ...). In Unicode 3.2 (as of Perl 5.8) some naming changes took place, and ISO 6429 was updated, see ALIASES.

If the input name is unknown, \N{NAME} raises a warning and substitutes the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (U+FFFD).

For \N{NAME} , it is a fatal error if use bytes is in effect and the input name is that of a character that won't fit into a byte (i.e., whose ordinal is above 255).

Otherwise, any string that includes a \N{charname} or \N{U+code point} will automatically have Unicode semantics (see Byte and Character Semantics in perlunicode).

ALIASES

A few aliases have been defined for convenience: instead of having to use the official names

  1. LINE FEED (LF)
  2. FORM FEED (FF)
  3. CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)
  4. NEXT LINE (NEL)

(yes, with parentheses), one can use

  1. LINE FEED
  2. FORM FEED
  3. CARRIAGE RETURN
  4. NEXT LINE
  5. LF
  6. FF
  7. CR
  8. NEL

All the other standard abbreviations for the controls, such as ACK for ACKNOWLEDGE also can be used.

One can also use

  1. BYTE ORDER MARK
  2. BOM

and these abbreviations

  1. Abbreviation Full Name
  2. CGJ COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER
  3. FVS1 MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR ONE
  4. FVS2 MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR TWO
  5. FVS3 MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR THREE
  6. LRE LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING
  7. LRM LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK
  8. LRO LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE
  9. MMSP MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE
  10. MVS MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR
  11. NBSP NO-BREAK SPACE
  12. NNBSP NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE
  13. PDF POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING
  14. RLE RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING
  15. RLM RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK
  16. RLO RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE
  17. SHY SOFT HYPHEN
  18. VS1 VARIATION SELECTOR-1
  19. .
  20. .
  21. .
  22. VS256 VARIATION SELECTOR-256
  23. WJ WORD JOINER
  24. ZWJ ZERO WIDTH JOINER
  25. ZWNJ ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
  26. ZWSP ZERO WIDTH SPACE

For backward compatibility one can use the old names for certain C0 and C1 controls

  1. old new
  2. FILE SEPARATOR INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR
  3. GROUP SEPARATOR INFORMATION SEPARATOR THREE
  4. HORIZONTAL TABULATION CHARACTER TABULATION
  5. HORIZONTAL TABULATION SET CHARACTER TABULATION SET
  6. HORIZONTAL TABULATION WITH JUSTIFICATION CHARACTER TABULATION
  7. WITH JUSTIFICATION
  8. PARTIAL LINE DOWN PARTIAL LINE FORWARD
  9. PARTIAL LINE UP PARTIAL LINE BACKWARD
  10. RECORD SEPARATOR INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO
  11. REVERSE INDEX REVERSE LINE FEED
  12. UNIT SEPARATOR INFORMATION SEPARATOR ONE
  13. VERTICAL TABULATION LINE TABULATION
  14. VERTICAL TABULATION SET LINE TABULATION SET

but the old names in addition to giving the character will also give a warning about being deprecated.

And finally, certain published variants are usable, including some for controls that have no Unicode names:

  1. name character
  2. END OF PROTECTED AREA END OF GUARDED AREA, U+0097
  3. HIGH OCTET PRESET U+0081
  4. HOP U+0081
  5. IND U+0084
  6. INDEX U+0084
  7. PAD U+0080
  8. PADDING CHARACTER U+0080
  9. PRIVATE USE 1 PRIVATE USE ONE, U+0091
  10. PRIVATE USE 2 PRIVATE USE TWO, U+0092
  11. SGC U+0099
  12. SINGLE GRAPHIC CHARACTER INTRODUCER U+0099
  13. SINGLE-SHIFT 2 SINGLE SHIFT TWO, U+008E
  14. SINGLE-SHIFT 3 SINGLE SHIFT THREE, U+008F
  15. START OF PROTECTED AREA START OF GUARDED AREA, U+0096

CUSTOM ALIASES

You can add customized aliases to standard (:full ) Unicode naming conventions. The aliases override any standard definitions, so, if you're twisted enough, you can change "\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A}" to mean "B" , etc.

Note that an alias should not be something that is a legal curly brace-enclosed quantifier (see QUANTIFIERS in perlreref). For example \N{123} means to match 123 non-newline characters, and is not treated as a charnames alias. Aliases are discouraged from beginning with anything other than an alphabetic character and from containing anything other than alphanumerics, spaces, dashes, parentheses, and underscores. Currently they must be ASCII.

An alias can map to either an official Unicode character name or to a numeric code point (ordinal). The latter is useful for assigning names to code points in Unicode private use areas such as U+E800 through U+F8FF. A numeric code point must be a non-negative integer or a string beginning with "U+" or "0x" with the remainder considered to be a hexadecimal integer. A literal numeric constant must be unsigned; it will be interpreted as hex if it has a leading zero or contains non-decimal hex digits; otherwise it will be interpreted as decimal.

Aliases are added either by the use of anonymous hashes:

  1. use charnames ":alias" => {
  2. e_ACUTE => "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE",
  3. mychar1 => 0xE8000,
  4. };
  5. my $str = "\N{e_ACUTE}";

or by using a file containing aliases:

  1. use charnames ":alias" => "pro";

This will try to read "unicore/pro_alias.pl" from the @INC path. This file should return a list in plain perl:

  1. (
  2. A_GRAVE => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE",
  3. A_CIRCUM => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX",
  4. A_DIAERES => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS",
  5. A_TILDE => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE",
  6. A_BREVE => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE",
  7. A_RING => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE",
  8. A_MACRON => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON",
  9. mychar2 => "U+E8001",
  10. );

Both these methods insert ":full" automatically as the first argument (if no other argument is given), and you can give the ":full" explicitly as well, like

  1. use charnames ":full", ":alias" => "pro";

Also, both these methods currently allow only a single character to be named. To name a sequence of characters, use a custom translator (described below).

charnames::viacode(code)

Returns the full name of the character indicated by the numeric code. For example,

  1. print charnames::viacode(0x2722);

prints "FOUR TEARDROP-SPOKED ASTERISK".

The name returned is the official name for the code point, if available; otherwise your custom alias for it. This means that your alias will only be returned for code points that don't have an official Unicode name (nor Unicode version 1 name), such as private use code points, and the 4 control characters U+0080, U+0081, U+0084, and U+0099. If you define more than one name for the code point, it is indeterminate which one will be returned.

The function returns undef if no name is known for the code point. In Unicode the proper name of these is the empty string, which undef stringifies to. (If you ask for a code point past the legal Unicode maximum of U+10FFFF that you haven't assigned an alias to, you get undef plus a warning.)

The input number must be a non-negative integer or a string beginning with "U+" or "0x" with the remainder considered to be a hexadecimal integer. A literal numeric constant must be unsigned; it will be interpreted as hex if it has a leading zero or contains non-decimal hex digits; otherwise it will be interpreted as decimal.

Notice that the name returned for of U+FEFF is "ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE", not "BYTE ORDER MARK".

charnames::string_vianame(name)

This is a runtime equivalent to \N{...} . name can be any expression that evaluates to a name accepted by \N{...} under the :full option to charnames . In addition, any other options for the controlling "use charnames" in the same scope apply, like any script list, :short option, or custom aliases you may have defined.

The only difference is that if the input name is unknown, string_vianame returns undef instead of the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER and does not raise a warning message.

charnames::vianame(name)

This is similar to string_vianame . The main difference is that under most circumstances (see BUGS for the others), vianame returns an ordinal code point, whereas string_vianame returns a string. For example,

  1. printf "U+%04X", charnames::vianame("FOUR TEARDROP-SPOKED ASTERISK");

prints "U+2722".

This leads to the other two differences. Since a single code point is returned, the function can't handle named character sequences, as these are composed of multiple characters. And, the code point can be that of any character, even ones that aren't legal under the use bytes pragma,

CUSTOM TRANSLATORS

The mechanism of translation of \N{...} escapes is general and not hardwired into charnames.pm. A module can install custom translations (inside the scope which uses the module) with the following magic incantation:

  1. sub import {
  2. shift;
  3. $^H{charnames} = \&translator;
  4. }

Here translator() is a subroutine which takes CHARNAME as an argument, and returns text to insert into the string instead of the \N{CHARNAME} escape. Since the text to insert should be different in bytes mode and out of it, the function should check the current state of bytes -flag as in:

  1. use bytes (); # for $bytes::hint_bits
  2. sub translator {
  3. if ($^H & $bytes::hint_bits) {
  4. return bytes_translator(@_);
  5. }
  6. else {
  7. return utf8_translator(@_);
  8. }
  9. }

See CUSTOM ALIASES above for restrictions on CHARNAME.

Of course, vianame and viacode would need to be overridden as well.

BUGS

vianame normally returns an ordinal code point, but when the input name is of the form U+... , it returns a chr instead. In this case, if use bytes is in effect and the character won't fit into a byte, it returns undef and raises a warning.

Names must be ASCII characters only, which means that you are out of luck if you want to create aliases in a language where some or all the characters of the desired aliases are non-ASCII.

Since evaluation of the translation function (see CUSTOM TRANSLATORS) happens in the middle of compilation (of a string literal), the translation function should not do any evals or requires. This restriction should be lifted (but is low priority) in a future version of Perl.