Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Custom Character Names

You can create custom character names to allow for more convenient typing or to give names to codepoints Unicode hasn’t assigned a name to. Aliases are added either using anonymous hashes:

use charnames ":alias" => {
    e_ACUTE      => "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE",
    "APPLE LOGO" => 0xF8FF,  # private–use codepoint
};
my $str = "\N{APPLE LOGO}";

or using a file containing a list of key/value pairs:

use charnames ":alias" => "pro";  # look in unicore/pro_alias.pl

The specified file should be under a unicore/ subdirectory somewhere in the @INC path, and it should be named using a trailing _alias.pl at the end. So, for example, the file looked for above will be unicore/pro_alias.pl. This file should return a list in plain Perl:

(
    A_grave    => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH GRAVE",
    A_circ     => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX",
    A_diaer    => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS",
    A_dier     => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS",
    A_uml      => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS",
    A_tilde    => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH TILDE",
    A_macron   => "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON",
);

Both these methods insert :full automatically as the first argument if no other argument is given; you can also give the :full explicitly:

use charnames ":full", ":alias" => "pro";

Even private-use characters can gain names. For example, after:

use charnames ":full", ":alias" => { "TENGWAR LETTER TINCO" => 0xE000, "TENGWAR LETTER PARMA" => 0xE001, "TENGWAR LETTER CALMA" => 0xE002, "TENGWAR LETTER QUESSE" ...