charnames - define character names for C<\N{named}> string literal escapes


perl documentation Contained in the perl distribution.

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NAME

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charnames - define character names for \N{named} string literal escapes

SYNOPSIS

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  use charnames ':full';
  print "\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA} is called sigma.\n";

  use charnames ':short';
  print "\N{greek:Sigma} is an upper-case sigma.\n";

  use charnames qw(cyrillic greek);
  print "\N{sigma} is Greek sigma, and \N{be} is Cyrillic b.\n";

  use charnames ":full", ":alias" => {
    e_ACUTE => "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE",
  };
  print "\N{e_ACUTE} is a small letter e with an acute.\n";

  use charnames ();
  print charnames::viacode(0x1234); # prints "ETHIOPIC SYLLABLE SEE"
  printf "%04X", charnames::vianame("GOTHIC LETTER AHSA"); # prints "10330"

DESCRIPTION

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Pragma use charnames 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 pragma 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 are explained in CUSTOM ALIASES.

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

  SCRIPTNAME CAPITAL LETTER CHARNAME
  SCRIPTNAME SMALL LETTER CHARNAME
  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-quoted strings: in other words, you cannot use variables inside the \N{...}. If you want similar run-time functionality, use charnames::vianame().

For the C0 and C1 control characters (U+0000..U+001F, U+0080..U+009F) as of Unicode 3.1, there are no official Unicode names but you can use instead the ISO 6429 names (LINE FEED, ESCAPE, and so forth). In Unicode 3.2 (as of Perl 5.8) some naming changes take place ISO 6429 has been updated, see ALIASES. Also note that the U+UU80, U+0081, U+0084, and U+0099 do not have names even in ISO 6429.

Since the Unicode standard uses "U+HHHH", so can you: "\N{U+263a}" is the Unicode smiley face, or "\N{WHITE SMILING FACE}".

ALIASES

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

    LINE FEED (LF)
    FORM FEED (FF)
    CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)
    NEXT LINE (NEL)

(yes, with parentheses) one can use

    LINE FEED
    FORM FEED
    CARRIAGE RETURN
    NEXT LINE
    LF
    FF
    CR
    NEL

One can also use

    BYTE ORDER MARK
    BOM

and

    ZWNJ
    ZWJ

for ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER and ZERO WIDTH JOINER.

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

    old                         new

    HORIZONTAL TABULATION       CHARACTER TABULATION
    VERTICAL TABULATION         LINE TABULATION
    FILE SEPARATOR              INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR
    GROUP SEPARATOR             INFORMATION SEPARATOR THREE
    RECORD SEPARATOR            INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO
    UNIT SEPARATOR              INFORMATION SEPARATOR ONE
    PARTIAL LINE DOWN           PARTIAL LINE FORWARD
    PARTIAL LINE UP             PARTIAL LINE BACKWARD

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

CUSTOM ALIASES

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This version of charnames supports three mechanisms of adding local or customized aliases to standard Unicode naming conventions (:full).

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 an alias. Aliases are discouraged from beginning with anything other than an alphabetic character and from containing anything other than alphanumerics, spaces, dashes, colons, parentheses, and underscores. Currently they must be ASCII.

Anonymous hashes

    use charnames ":full", ":alias" => {
        e_ACUTE => "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE",
        };
    my $str = "\N{e_ACUTE}";

Alias file

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

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

    (
    A_GRAVE         => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE",
    A_CIRCUM        => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX",
    A_DIAERES       => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS",
    A_TILDE         => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE",
    A_BREVE         => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE",
    A_RING          => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE",
    A_MACRON        => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON",
    );

Alias shortcut

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

    works exactly the same as the alias pairs, only this time,
    ":full" is inserted automatically as first argument (if no
    other argument is given).

charnames::viacode(code)

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

    print charnames::viacode(0x2722);

prints "FOUR TEARDROP-SPOKED ASTERISK".

Returns undef if no name is known for the code.

This works only for the standard names, and does not yet apply to custom translators.

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

charnames::vianame(name)

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Returns the code point indicated by the name. The example

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

prints "2722".

Returns undef if the name is unknown.

This works only for the standard names, and does not yet apply to custom translators.

CUSTOM TRANSLATORS

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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:

    sub import {
	shift;
	$^H{charnames} = \&translator;
    }

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:

    use bytes ();			# for $bytes::hint_bits
    sub translator {
	if ($^H & $bytes::hint_bits) {
	    return bytes_translator(@_);
	}
	else {
	    return utf8_translator(@_);
	}
    }

See CUSTOM ALIASES above for restrictions on CHARNAME.

ILLEGAL CHARACTERS

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If you ask by name for a character that does not exist, a warning is given and the Unicode replacement character "\x{FFFD}" is returned.

If you ask by code for a character that is unassigned, no warning is given and undef is returned. (Though if you ask for a code point past U+10FFFF you do get a warning.) See BUGS below.

BUGS

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viacode should return an empty string for unassigned in-range Unicode code points, as that is their correct current name.

viacode(0) doesn't return NULL, but undef

vianame returns a chr if the input name is of the form U+..., and an ord otherwise. It is planned to change this to always return an ord.

None of the functions work on almost all the Hangul syllable and CJK Unicode characters that have their code points as part of their names.

Names must be ASCII characters only.

Unicode standard named sequences are not recognized, such as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON AND GRAVE (which should mean LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON with an additional COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT).

Since evaluation of the translation function 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 in a future version of Perl.


perl documentation Contained in the perl distribution.

package charnames;
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Spec;
our $VERSION = '1.07';

use bytes ();		# for $bytes::hint_bits

my %alias1 = (
		# Icky 3.2 names with parentheses.
		'LINE FEED'		=> 'LINE FEED (LF)',
		'FORM FEED'		=> 'FORM FEED (FF)',
		'CARRIAGE RETURN'	=> 'CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)',
		'NEXT LINE'		=> 'NEXT LINE (NEL)',
		# Convenience.
		'LF'			=> 'LINE FEED (LF)',
		'FF'			=> 'FORM FEED (FF)',
		'CR'			=> 'CARRIAGE RETURN (CR)',
		'NEL'			=> 'NEXT LINE (NEL)',
	        # More convenience.  For futher convencience,
	        # it is suggested some way using using the NamesList
		# aliases is implemented.
	        'ZWNJ'			=> 'ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER',
	        'ZWJ'			=> 'ZERO WIDTH JOINER',
		'BOM'			=> 'BYTE ORDER MARK',
	    );

my %alias2 = (
		# Pre-3.2 compatibility (only for the first 256 characters).
		'HORIZONTAL TABULATION'	=> 'CHARACTER TABULATION',
		'VERTICAL TABULATION'	=> 'LINE TABULATION',
		'FILE SEPARATOR'	=> 'INFORMATION SEPARATOR FOUR',
		'GROUP SEPARATOR'	=> 'INFORMATION SEPARATOR THREE',
		'RECORD SEPARATOR'	=> 'INFORMATION SEPARATOR TWO',
		'UNIT SEPARATOR'	=> 'INFORMATION SEPARATOR ONE',
		'PARTIAL LINE DOWN'	=> 'PARTIAL LINE FORWARD',
		'PARTIAL LINE UP'	=> 'PARTIAL LINE BACKWARD',
	    );

my %alias3 = (
		# User defined aliasses. Even more convenient :)
	    );
my $txt;

sub croak
{
  require Carp; goto &Carp::croak;
} # croak

sub carp
{
  require Carp; goto &Carp::carp;
} # carp

sub alias (@)
{
  @_ or return %alias3;
  my $alias = ref $_[0] ? $_[0] : { @_ };
  @alias3{keys %$alias} = values %$alias;
} # alias

sub alias_file ($)
{
  my ($arg, $file) = @_;
  if (-f $arg && File::Spec->file_name_is_absolute ($arg)) {
    $file = $arg;
  }
  elsif ($arg =~ m/^\w+$/) {
    $file = "unicore/${arg}_alias.pl";
  }
  else {
    croak "Charnames alias files can only have identifier characters";
  }
  if (my @alias = do $file) {
    @alias == 1 && !defined $alias[0] and
      croak "$file cannot be used as alias file for charnames";
    @alias % 2 and
      croak "$file did not return a (valid) list of alias pairs";
    alias (@alias);
    return (1);
  }
  0;
} # alias_file

# This is not optimized in any way yet
sub charnames
{
  my $name = shift;

  if (exists $alias1{$name}) {
    $name = $alias1{$name};
  }
  elsif (exists $alias2{$name}) {
    require warnings;
    warnings::warnif('deprecated', qq{Unicode character name "$name" is deprecated, use "$alias2{$name}" instead});
    $name = $alias2{$name};
  }
  elsif (exists $alias3{$name}) {
    $name = $alias3{$name};
  }

  my $ord;
  my @off;
  my $fname;

  if ($name eq "BYTE ORDER MARK") {
    $fname = $name;
    $ord = 0xFEFF;
  } else {
    ## Suck in the code/name list as a big string.
    ## Lines look like:
    ##     "0052\t\tLATIN CAPITAL LETTER R\n"
    $txt = do "unicore/Name.pl" unless $txt;

    ## @off will hold the index into the code/name string of the start and
    ## end of the name as we find it.

    ## If :full, look for the name exactly
    if ($^H{charnames_full} and $txt =~ /\t\t\Q$name\E$/m) {
      @off = ($-[0], $+[0]);
    }

    ## If we didn't get above, and :short allowed, look for the short name.
    ## The short name is like "greek:Sigma"
    unless (@off) {
      if ($^H{charnames_short} and $name =~ /^(.+?):(.+)/s) {
	my ($script, $cname) = ($1, $2);
	my $case = $cname =~ /[[:upper:]]/ ? "CAPITAL" : "SMALL";
	if ($txt =~ m/\t\t\U$script\E (?:$case )?LETTER \U\Q$cname\E$/m) {
	  @off = ($-[0], $+[0]);
	}
      }
    }

    ## If we still don't have it, check for the name among the loaded
    ## scripts.
    if (not @off) {
      my $case = $name =~ /[[:upper:]]/ ? "CAPITAL" : "SMALL";
      for my $script (@{$^H{charnames_scripts}}) {
	if ($txt =~ m/\t\t$script (?:$case )?LETTER \U\Q$name\E$/m) {
	  @off = ($-[0], $+[0]);
	  last;
	}
      }
    }

    ## If we don't have it by now, give up.
    unless (@off) {
      carp "Unknown charname '$name'";
      return "\x{FFFD}";
    }

    ##
    ## Now know where in the string the name starts.
    ## The code, in hex, is before that.
    ##
    ## The code can be 4-6 characters long, so we've got to sort of
    ## go look for it, just after the newline that comes before $off[0].
    ##
    ## This would be much easier if unicore/Name.pl had info in
    ## a name/code order, instead of code/name order.
    ##
    ## The +1 after the rindex() is to skip past the newline we're finding,
    ## or, if the rindex() fails, to put us to an offset of zero.
    ##
    my $hexstart = rindex($txt, "\n", $off[0]) + 1;

    ## we know where it starts, so turn into number -
    ## the ordinal for the char.
    $ord = CORE::hex substr($txt, $hexstart, $off[0] - $hexstart);
  }

  if ($^H & $bytes::hint_bits) {	# "use bytes" in effect?
    use bytes;
    return chr $ord if $ord <= 255;
    my $hex = sprintf "%04x", $ord;
    if (not defined $fname) {
      $fname = substr $txt, $off[0] + 2, $off[1] - $off[0] - 2;
    }
    croak "Character 0x$hex with name '$fname' is above 0xFF";
  }

  no warnings 'utf8'; # allow even illegal characters
  return pack "U", $ord;
} # charnames

sub import
{
  shift; ## ignore class name

  if (not @_) {
    carp("`use charnames' needs explicit imports list");
  }
  $^H{charnames} = \&charnames ;

  ##
  ## fill %h keys with our @_ args.
  ##
  my ($promote, %h, @args) = (0);
  while (my $arg = shift) {
    if ($arg eq ":alias") {
      @_ or
	croak ":alias needs an argument in charnames";
      my $alias = shift;
      if (ref $alias) {
	ref $alias eq "HASH" or
	  croak "Only HASH reference supported as argument to :alias";
	alias ($alias);
	next;
      }
      if ($alias =~ m{:(\w+)$}) {
	$1 eq "full" || $1 eq "short" and
	  croak ":alias cannot use existing pragma :$1 (reversed order?)";
	alias_file ($1) and $promote = 1;
	next;
      }
      alias_file ($alias);
      next;
    }
    if (substr($arg, 0, 1) eq ':' and ! ($arg eq ":full" || $arg eq ":short")) {
      warn "unsupported special '$arg' in charnames";
      next;
    }
    push @args, $arg;
  }
  @args == 0 && $promote and @args = (":full");
  @h{@args} = (1) x @args;

  $^H{charnames_full} = delete $h{':full'};
  $^H{charnames_short} = delete $h{':short'};
  $^H{charnames_scripts} = [map uc, keys %h];

  ##
  ## If utf8? warnings are enabled, and some scripts were given,
  ## see if at least we can find one letter of each script.
  ##
  if (warnings::enabled('utf8') && @{$^H{charnames_scripts}}) {
    $txt = do "unicore/Name.pl" unless $txt;

    for my $script (@{$^H{charnames_scripts}}) {
      if (not $txt =~ m/\t\t$script (?:CAPITAL |SMALL )?LETTER /) {
	warnings::warn('utf8',  "No such script: '$script'");
      }
    }
  }
} # import

my %viacode;

sub viacode
{
  if (@_ != 1) {
    carp "charnames::viacode() expects one argument";
    return;
  }

  my $arg = shift;

  # this comes actually from Unicode::UCD, where it is the named
  # function _getcode (), but it avoids the overhead of loading it
  my $hex;
  if ($arg =~ /^[1-9]\d*$/) {
    $hex = sprintf "%04X", $arg;
  } elsif ($arg =~ /^(?:[Uu]\+|0[xX])?([[:xdigit:]]+)$/) {
    $hex = $1;
  } else {
    carp("unexpected arg \"$arg\" to charnames::viacode()");
    return;
  }

  # checking the length first is slightly faster
  if (length($hex) > 5 && hex($hex) > 0x10FFFF) {
    carp "Unicode characters only allocated up to U+10FFFF (you asked for U+$hex)";
    return;
  }

  return $viacode{$hex} if exists $viacode{$hex};

  $txt = do "unicore/Name.pl" unless $txt;

  return unless $txt =~ m/^$hex\t\t(.+)/m;

  $viacode{$hex} = $1;
} # viacode

my %vianame;

sub vianame
{
  if (@_ != 1) {
    carp "charnames::vianame() expects one name argument";
    return ()
  }

  my $arg = shift;

  return chr CORE::hex $1 if $arg =~ /^U\+([0-9a-fA-F]+)$/;

  return $vianame{$arg} if exists $vianame{$arg};

  $txt = do "unicore/Name.pl" unless $txt;

  my $pos = index $txt, "\t\t$arg\n";
  if ($[ <= $pos) {
    my $posLF = rindex $txt, "\n", $pos;
    (my $code = substr $txt, $posLF + 1, 6) =~ tr/\t//d;
    return $vianame{$arg} = CORE::hex $code;

    # If $pos is at the 1st line, $posLF must be $[ - 1 (not found);
    # then $posLF + 1 equals to $[ (at the beginning of $txt).
    # Otherwise $posLF is the position of "\n";
    # then $posLF + 1 must be the position of the next to "\n"
    # (the beginning of the line).
    # substr($txt, $posLF + 1, 6) may be "0000\t\t", "00A1\t\t",
    # "10300\t", "100000", etc. So we can get the code via removing TAB.
  } else {
    return;
  }
} # vianame


1;
__END__