The following areas need further work.
-=over
+=over 4
=item Input and Output Disciplines
There is currently no easy way to mark data read from a file or other
external source as being utf8. This will be one of the major areas of
-focus in the near future.
+focus in the near future. Unfortunately it is unlikely that the Perl
+5.6 and earlier will ever gain this capability.
=item Regular Expressions
If the C<-C> command line switch is used, (or the ${^WIDE_SYSTEM_CALLS}
global flag is set to C<1>), all system calls will use the
corresponding wide character APIs. This is currently only implemented
-on Windows.
+on Windows as other platforms do not have a unified way of handling
+wide character APIs.
Regardless of the above, the C<bytes> pragma can always be used to force
byte semantics in a particular lexical scope. See L<bytes>.
Regular expressions match characters instead of bytes. For instance,
"." matches a character instead of a byte. (However, the C<\C> pattern
-is provided to force a match a single byte ("C<char>" in C, hence
-C<\C>).)
+is available to force a match a single byte ("C<char>" in C, hence C<\C>).)
=item *
=item *
-The C<tr///> operator translates characters instead of bytes. It can also
-be forced to translate between 8-bit codes and UTF-8. For instance, if you
-know your input in Latin-1, you can say:
-
- while (<>) {
- tr/\0-\xff//CU; # latin1 char to utf8
- ...
- }
-
-Similarly you could translate your output with
-
- tr/\0-\x{ff}//UC; # utf8 to latin1 char
-
-No, C<s///> doesn't take /U or /C (yet?).
+The C<tr///> operator translates characters instead of bytes. Note
+that the C<tr///CU> functionality has been removed, as the interface
+was a mistake. For similar functionality see pack('U0', ...) and
+pack('C0', ...).
=item *
=item *
+The bit string operators C<& | ^ ~> can operate on character data.
+However, for backward compatibility reasons (bit string operations
+when the characters all are less than 256 in ordinal value) one cannot
+mix C<~> (the bit complement) and characters both less than 256 and
+equal or greater than 256. Most importantly, the DeMorgan's laws
+(C<~($x|$y) eq ~$x&~$y>, C<~($x&$y) eq ~$x|~$y>) won't hold.
+Another way to look at this is that the complement cannot return
+B<both> the 8-bit (byte) wide bit complement, and the full character
+wide bit complement.
+
+=item *
+
And finally, C<scalar reverse()> reverses by character rather than by byte.
=back
=head2 Character encodings for input and output
-[XXX: This feature is not yet implemented.]
+This feature is in the process of getting implemented.
+
+(For Perl 5.6 and earlier the support is unlikely to get integrated
+to the core language and some external module will be required.)
=head1 CAVEATS