Character Ranges and Classes
-Character ranges in regular expression character classes (C</[a-z]/>)
-and in the C<tr///> (also known as C<y///>) operator are not magically
-Unicode-aware. What this means is that C<[A-Za-z]> will not magically start
-to mean "all alphabetic letters"; not that it does mean that even for
-8-bit characters, you should be using C</[[:alpha:]]/> in that case.
-
-For specifying character classes like that in regular expressions,
-you can use the various Unicode properties--C<\pL>, or perhaps
-C<\p{Alphabetic}>, in this particular case. You can use Unicode
-code points as the end points of character ranges, but there is no
-magic associated with specifying a certain range. For further
-information--there are dozens of Unicode character classes--see
-L<perlunicode>.
+Character ranges in regular expression bracketed character classes ( e.g.,
+C</[a-z]/>) and in the C<tr///> (also known as C<y///>) operator are not
+magically Unicode-aware. What this means is that C<[A-Za-z]> will not
+magically start to mean "all alphabetic letters" (not that it does mean that
+even for 8-bit characters; for those, if you are using locales (L<perllocale>),
+use C</[[:alpha:]]/>; and if not, use the 8-bit-aware property C<\p{alpha}>).
+
+All the properties that begin with C<\p> (and its inverse C<\P>) are actually
+character classes that are Unicode-aware. There are dozens of them, see
+L<perluniprops>.
+
+You can use Unicode code points as the end points of character ranges, and the
+range will include all Unicode code points that lie between those end points.
=item *
How Do I Know Whether My String Is In Unicode?
You shouldn't have to care. But you may, because currently the semantics of the
-characters whose ordinals are in the range 128 to 255 is different depending on
+characters whose ordinals are in the range 128 to 255 are different depending on
whether the string they are contained within is in Unicode or not.
(See L<perlunicode/When Unicode Does Not Happen>.)
return the value of the internal "utf8ness" flag attached to the
C<$string>. If the flag is off, the bytes in the scalar are interpreted
as a single byte encoding. If the flag is on, the bytes in the scalar
-are interpreted as the (multi-byte, variable-length) UTF-8 encoded code
-points of the characters. Bytes added to a UTF-8 encoded string are
+are interpreted as the (variable-length, potentially multi-byte) UTF-8 encoded
+code points of the characters. Bytes added to a UTF-8 encoded string are
automatically upgraded to UTF-8. If mixed non-UTF-8 and UTF-8 scalars
are merged (double-quoted interpolation, explicit concatenation, and
printf/sprintf parameter substitution), the result will be UTF-8 encoded
use bytes;
print length($unicode), "\n"; # will also print 2
# (the 0xC4 0x80 of the UTF-8)
+ no bytes;
=item *