Autoload charnames for \N{name}

This autoloads charnames.pm when needed.  It uses the :full and :short
options.  :loose is not used because of its relative unfamiliarity in
the Perl community, and is slower.  (If someone later added a typical
"use charnames qw(:full)", things that previously matched under :loose
would start to fail, causing confustion.  If :loose does become more
common, we can change this in the future to use it; the converse isn't
true.)

The callable functions in the module are not automatically loaded.  To
access them, an explicity "use charnames" must be provided.

Thanks to Tony Cook for doing a code inspection and finding a missing
SPAGAIN.

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/pod/perlrebackslash.pod b/pod/perlrebackslash.pod
index df646d5465..f9b963c96c 100644
--- a/pod/perlrebackslash.pod
+++ b/pod/perlrebackslash.pod
@@ -173,8 +173,7 @@ C<\N{}> construct to specify a character by either of these values.
 Certain sequences of characters also have names.
 
 To specify by name, the name of the character or character sequence goes
-between the curly braces.  In this case, you have to C<use charnames> to
-load the Unicode names of the characters; otherwise Perl will complain.
+between the curly braces.
 
 To specify a character by Unicode code point, use the form C<\N{U+I<code
 point>}>, where I<code point> is a number in hexadecimal that gives the
@@ -201,7 +200,6 @@ meaning by the regex engine, and will match "as is".
 
 =head4 Example
 
- use charnames ':full';               # Loads the Unicode names.
  $str =~ /\N{THAI CHARACTER SO SO}/;  # Matches the Thai SO SO character
 
  use charnames 'Cyrillic';            # Loads Cyrillic names.