Programming Perl, 4th Edition

charnames

use charnames HOW;
print "\N{CHARNAME} is a funny character";

use charnames ();  # no compile–time \N{}, just run–time functions

All forms other than use charnames () enable interpolation of named characters into strings and regexes using the \N{CHARNAME} notation:

use charnames ":full";
print "\N{GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA} is called sigma.\n";

use charnames ":short";
print "\N{greek:Sigma} is an uppercase sigma.\n";

use charnames qw(cyrillic greek);
print "\N{sigma} is Greek sigma, and \N{be} is Cyrillic b.\n";

use charnames ":full", ":alias" => {
    "WRY CAT" => "CAT FACE WITH WRY SMILE",
    "AMELIA"  => "DROMEDARY CAMEL",
    "s with comma" => 0x0219,
};

# ":loose" supported on v5.16 and later only
use charnames ":loose";

If :full is present, then \N{CHARNAME} is expanded by looking first in the list of standard Unicode character names. If :short is present, and CHARNAME has the form SCRIPT:CNAME, then CNAME is looked up as a letter in script SCRIPT. If :loose is present (and you are running v5.16 or better), it works just like :full except names are looked up without regard to case, whitespace, or underscores, just as in Unicode property names in regexes.

Used with one or more Unicode script name arguments,^[260] CHARNAME is looked up as a letter in the given scripts, first looking in the first listed script, then the next one if any, and so on. For lookup of CHARNAME inside a given script SCRIPTNAME, it looks for the names:

SCRIPTNAME CAPITAL LETTER CHARNAME
SCRIPTNAME SMALL LETTER ...