Update the Mac OS X situation.

[p5sagit/p5-mst-13.2.git] / pod / perluniintro.pod

diff --git a/pod/perluniintro.pod b/pod/perluniintro.pod
index e36bb07..d6eae60 100644 (file)
--- a/pod/perluniintro.pod
+++ b/pod/perluniintro.pod
@@ -128,10 +128,9 @@ This model was found to be wrong, or at least clumsy: the Unicodeness
 is now carried with the data, not attached to the operations.  (There
 is one remaining case where an explicit C<use utf8> is needed: if your
 Perl script itself is encoded in UTF-8, you can use UTF-8 in your
-variable and subroutine names, and in your string and regular
-expression literals, by saying C<use utf8>.  This is not the default
-because that would break existing scripts having legacy 8-bit data in
-them.)
+identifier names, and in your string and regular expression literals,
+by saying C<use utf8>.  This is not the default because that would
+break existing scripts having legacy 8-bit data in them.)
 
 =head2 Perl's Unicode Model
 
@@ -169,16 +168,20 @@ To output UTF-8 always, use the ":utf8" output discipline.  Prepending
 to this sample program ensures the output is completely UTF-8, and      
 of course, removes the warning.
 
+If your locale environment variables (LANGUAGE, LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG)
+contain the strings 'UTF-8' or 'UTF8' (case-insensitive matching),
+the default encoding of your STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR, and of
+B<any subsequent file open>, is UTF-8.  Note that this means
+that Perl expects other software to work, too: if STDIN coming
+in from another command is not UTF-8, Perl will complain about
+malformed UTF-8.
+
 =head2 Unicode and EBCDIC
 
 Perl 5.8.0 also supports Unicode on EBCDIC platforms.  There,
 the Unicode support is somewhat more complex to implement since
 additional conversions are needed at every step.  Some problems
-remain, but they all seem to be related to the combination of
-the extra mapping just described and case-insensitive matching:
-for example, "\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.)
+remain, see L<perlebcdic> for details.
 
 In any case, the Unicode support on EBCDIC platforms is better than
 in the 5.6 series, which didn't work much at all for EBCDIC platform.
@@ -276,8 +279,8 @@ C<Latin 2>, or C<iso8859-2>, and so forth.  With just
 
     use encoding;
 
-first the environment variable C<PERL_ENCODING> will be consulted,
-and if that doesn't exist, ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1) will be assumed.
+the environment variable C<PERL_ENCODING> will be consulted,
+but if that doesn't exist, the encoding pragma fails.
 
 The C<Encode> module knows about many encodings and it has interfaces
 for doing conversions between those encodings:
@@ -621,13 +624,16 @@ the output string will be UTF-8-encoded "ab\x80c\x{100}\n", but note
 that C<$a> will stay single byte encoded.
 
 Sometimes you might really need to know the byte length of a string
-instead of the character length.  For that use the C<bytes> pragma
-and its only defined function C<length()>:
+instead of the character length. For that use either the
+C<Encode::encode_utf8()> function or the C<bytes> pragma and its only
+defined function C<length()>:
 
     my $unicode = chr(0x100);
     print length($unicode), "\n"; # will print 1
+    require Encode;
+    print length(Encode::encode_utf8($unicode)), "\n"; # will print 2
     use bytes;
-    print length($unicode), "\n"; # will print 2 (the 0xC4 0x80 of the UTF-8)
+    print length($unicode), "\n"; # will also print 2 (the 0xC4 0x80 of the UTF-8)
 
 =item