This isn’t a complete or comprehensive introduction to Unicode; it’s
just enough for you to understand the parts of Unicode that we present in
Learning
Perl. Unicode is tricky not only because it’s a new way
to think about strings, with lots of adjusted vocabulary, but also because
computer languages in general have implemented it so poorly. Perl 5.14 makes
lots of improvements to Perl’s Unicode compliance, but it’s not perfect
(yet). Each version since then has brought Perl closer to full compliance.
It is, arguably, the best Unicode support that you will find, though.
Unicode
The Universal Character Set (UCS) is an abstract mapping of characters to code
points. It has nothing to do with a particular representation
in memory, which means we can agree on at least one way to talk about
characters no matter which platform we’re on. An encoding turns the code points into
a particular representation in memory, taking the abstract mapping and
representing it physically within a computer. You probably think of this
storage in terms of bytes, although when talking about Unicode, we use the
term octets (see Figure C-1). Different encodings store the
characters differently. To go the other way, interpreting the octets as
characters, you decode them. You don’t have to
worry too much about these because Perl can handle most of the details for
you.
Figure C-1. The code ...
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