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| -rw-r--r-- | pod/perlport.pod | 16 |
1 files changed, 16 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/pod/perlport.pod b/pod/perlport.pod index b6aca781de..a92e4aa89d 100644 --- a/pod/perlport.pod +++ b/pod/perlport.pod @@ -629,6 +629,22 @@ and time formatting--amongst other things. If you really want to be international, you should consider Unicode. See L<perluniintro> and L<perlunicode> for more information. +If you want to use non-ASCII bytes (outside the bytes 0x00..0x7f) in +the "source code" of your code, to be portable you have to be explicit +about what bytes they are. Someone might for example be using your +code under a UTF-8 locale, in which case random native bytes might be +illegal ("Malformed UTF-8 ...") This means that for example embedding +ISO 8859-1 bytes beyond 0x7f into your strings might cause trouble +later. If the bytes are native 8-bit bytes, you can use the C<bytes> +pragma. If the bytes are in a string (regular expression being a +curious string), you can often also use the C<\xHH> notation instead +of embedding the bytes as-is. If they are in some particular legacy +encoding (ether single-byte or something more complicated), you can +use the C<encoding> pragma. (If you want to write your code in UTF-8, +you can use either the C<utf8> pragma, or the C<encoding> pragma.) +The C<bytes> and C<utf8> pragmata are available since Perl 5.6.0, and +the C<encoding> pragma since Perl 5.8.0. + =head2 System Resources If your code is destined for systems with severely constrained (or |