note
moritz
<blockquote>First question. If I call a function, how do I know if it returns a unicode string or not</blockquote>
<p>By reading the documentation. Core functions in perl (like for example [doc://uc]) return a string of the same kind as they receive: Unicode in, Unicode out. Modules should(!) document what they return.
<blockquote>How is a unicode string encoded (utf8 or 16 etc?)</blockquote>
<p>If you mean by "Unicode string" a string in perl's internal format, you shouldn't (and don't have to) care how it's encoded.
<blockquote>Second question. If I have a unicode string, how do I output it to my console window so that it appears correctly?</blockquote>
<p>If it's a string in perl's internal format, you need to add an encoding layer. For testing, use this small snippet:
<code>
use strict;
use warnings;
use charnames qw(:full);
binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
print "Euro: \N{EURO SIGN}\n"
</code>
<p>If this prints an Euro sign, your terminal works with UTF-8. If it shows [wp://Mojibake], configure your terminal to accept UTF-8.
<p>See also: [http://perlgeek.de/en/article/encodings-and-unicode|Encodings, Unicode and Perl]. It seems that you grasped the most important concepts about Unicode and Perl already, you just need to get a bit more familiar with how Perl handles it.
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540">
[http://perl6.org/|Perl 6] - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.
</div></div>
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