accented Latin characters. Languages that can employ ISO 8859-1
include all the languages covered by ASCII as well as Afrikaans,
Albanian, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Norwegian,
-Portugese, Spanish, and Swedish. Dutch is covered albeit without
+Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Dutch is covered albeit without
the ij ligature. French is covered too but without the oe ligature.
German can use ISO 8859-1 but must do so without German-style
quotation marks. This set is based on Western European extensions
The EBCDIC code page in use on Siemens' BS2000 system is distinct from
1047 and 0037. It is identified below as the POSIX-BC set.
+=head2 Unicode code points versus EBCDIC code points
+
+In Unicode terminology a I<code point> is the number assigned to a
+character: for example, in EBCDIC the character "A" is usually assigned
+the number 193. In Unicode the character "A" is assigned the number 65.
+This causes a problem with the semantics of the pack/unpack "U", which
+are supposed to pack Unicode code points to characters and back to numbers.
+The problem is: which code points to use for code points less than 256?
+(for 256 and over there's no problem: Unicode code points are used)
+In EBCDIC, for the low 256 the EBCDIC code points are used. This
+means that the equivalences
+
+ pack("U", ord($character)) eq $character
+ unpack("U", $character) == ord $character
+
+will hold. (If Unicode code points were applied consistently over
+all the possible code points, pack("U",ord("A")) would in EBCDIC
+equal I<A with acute> or chr(101), and unpack("U", "A") would equal
+65, or I<non-breaking space>, not 193, or ord "A".)
+
+=head2 Remaining Perl Unicode problems in EBCDIC
+
+=over 4
+
+=item *
+
+Many of the remaining seem to be related to case-insensitive matching:
+for example, C<< /[\x{131}]/ >> (LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS I) does
+not match "I" case-insensitively, as it should under Unicode.
+(The match succeeds in ASCII-derived platforms.)
+
+=item *
+
+The extensions Unicode::Collate and Unicode::Normalized are not
+supported under EBCDIC, likewise for the encoding pragma.
+
+=back
+
=head2 Unicode and UTF
UTF is a Unicode Transformation Format. UTF-8 is a Unicode conforming
UTF-EBCDIC is an attempt to represent Unicode characters in an EBCDIC
transparent manner.
+=head2 Using Encode
+
+Starting from Perl 5.8 you can use the standard new module Encode
+to translate from EBCDIC to Latin-1 code points
+
+ use Encode 'from_to';
+
+ my %ebcdic = ( 176 => 'cp37', 95 => 'cp1047', 106 => 'posix-bc' );
+
+ # $a is in EBCDIC code points
+ from_to($a, $ebcdic{ord '^'}, 'latin1');
+ # $a is ISO 8859-1 code points
+
+and from Latin-1 code points to EBCDIC code points
+
+ use Encode 'from_to';
+
+ my %ebcdic = ( 176 => 'cp37', 95 => 'cp1047', 106 => 'posix-bc' );
+
+ # $a is ISO 8859-1 code points
+ from_to($a, 'latin1', $ebcdic{ord '^'});
+ # $a is in EBCDIC code points
+
+For doing I/O it is suggested that you use the autotranslating features
+of PerlIO, see L<perluniintro>.
+
+Since version 5.8 Perl uses the new PerlIO I/O library. This enables
+you to use different encodings per IO channel. For example you may use
+
+ use Encode;
+ open($f, ">:encoding(ascii)", "test.ascii");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+ open($f, ">:encoding(cp37)", "test.ebcdic");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+ open($f, ">:encoding(latin1)", "test.latin1");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+ open($f, ">:encoding(utf8)", "test.utf8");
+ print $f "Hello World!\n";
+
+to get two files containing "Hello World!\n" in ASCII, CP 37 EBCDIC,
+ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) (in this example identical to ASCII) respective
+UTF-EBCDIC (in this example identical to normal EBCDIC). See the
+documentation of Encode::PerlIO for details.
+
+As the PerlIO layer uses raw IO (bytes) internally, all this totally
+ignores things like the type of your filesystem (ASCII or EBCDIC).
+
=head1 SINGLE OCTET TABLES
The following tables list the ASCII and Latin 1 ordered sets including
'\060\061\062\063\064\065\066\067\070\071\263\333\334\331\332\237' ;
my $ebcdic_string = $ascii_string;
- eval '$ebcdic_string =~ tr/\000-\377/' . $cp_037 . '/';
+ eval '$ebcdic_string =~ tr/' . $cp_037 . '/\000-\377/';
To convert from EBCDIC 037 to ASCII just reverse the order of the tr///
arguments like so:
my $ascii_string = $ebcdic_string;
- eval '$ascii_string = tr/' . $cp_037 . '/\000-\377/';
+ eval '$ascii_string =~ tr/\000-\377/' . $cp_037 . '/';
Similarly one could take the output of the third column from recipe 0 to
obtain a C<$cp_1047> table. The fourth column of the output from recipe
available from the shell or from the C library. Consult your system's
documentation for information on iconv.
-On OS/390 or z/OS see the iconv(1) man page. One way to invoke the iconv
+On OS/390 or z/OS see the iconv(1) manpage. One way to invoke the iconv
shell utility from within perl would be to:
# OS/390 or z/OS example
[A-Z] and [a-z] have been especially coded to not pick up gap
characters. For example, characters such as E<ocirc> C<o WITH CIRCUMFLEX>
that lie between I and J would not be matched by the
-regular expression range C</[H-K]/>.
+regular expression range C</[H-K]/>. This works in
+the other direction, too, if either of the range end points is
+explicitly numeric: C<[\x89-\x91]> will match C<\x8e>, even
+though C<\x89> is C<i> and C<\x91 > is C<j>, and C<\x8e>
+is a gap character from the alphabetic viewpoint.
If you do want to match the alphabet gap characters in a single octet
regular expression try matching the hex or octal code such
$all_byte_chrs = '';
for (0..255) { $all_byte_chrs .= chr($_); }
$uuencode_byte_chrs = pack('u', $all_byte_chrs);
- ($uu = <<' ENDOFHEREDOC') =~ s/^\s*//gm;
+ ($uu = <<'ENDOFHEREDOC') =~ s/^\s*//gm;
M``$"`P0%!@<("0H+#`T.#Q`1$A,4%187&!D:&QP='A\@(2(C)"4F)R@I*BLL
M+2XO,#$R,S0U-C<X.3H[/#T^/T!!0D-$149'2$E*2TQ-3D]045)35%565UA9
M6EM<75Y?8&%B8V1E9F=H:6IK;&UN;W!Q<G-T=79W>'EZ>WQ]?G^`@8*#A(6&
There may be a few system dependent issues
of concern to EBCDIC Perl programmers.
-=head2 OS/400
-
-The PASE environment.
+=head2 OS/400
=over 8
+=item PASE
+
+The PASE environment is runtime environment for OS/400 that can run
+executables built for PowerPC AIX in OS/400, see L<perlos400>. PASE
+is ASCII-based, not EBCDIC-based as the ILE.
+
=item IFS access
XXX.
was known to strip accented characters to their unaccented counterparts
while attempting to view this document through the B<pod2man> program
(for example, you may see a plain C<y> rather than one with a diaeresis
-as in E<yuml>). Another nroff truncated the resultant man page at
+as in E<yuml>). Another nroff truncated the resultant manpage at
the first occurrence of 8 bit characters.
Not all shells will allow multiple C<-e> string arguments to perl to