Programming Perl, 4th Edition

chr

chr NUMBER
chr

This function returns the character represented by NUMBER (truncated to an integer) in the Unicode character set. For example, chr(65) is “A”, latin small letter a, and chr(0x2122) is “™”, trade mark sign. For the reverse of chr, use ord.

If NUMBER is negative, this function produces the Unicode replacement character, U+FFFD.^[235]

(Note that characters with codepoints between 128 and 255 are by default internally not encoded as UTF-8 for backward-compatibility reasons. You shouldn’t ever notice this, but if you do, that’s why.)

If you’d rather specify your characters by name than by number (for example, “\N{WHITE SMILING FACE}” for a Unicode smiley, “☺”), see the section charnames in Chapter 29. To convert a character number to its official name instead of to the character itself, see that pragma’s charnames::viacode function.

^[235] Except under the bytes pragma, where the low eight bits of the value are used.