NAME Perl6::Str - Grapheme level string implementation for Perl 5 SYNOPSIS use Perl6::Str; use charnames qw(:full); my $s = Perl6::Str->new("a\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT}"); my $other = "\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE}"; if ($s eq $other) { print "Equality compared at grapheme level\n"; } # just one grapheme: printf "'%s' has %d logical characters\n", $s, $s->graphs; # prints the whole grapheme, not just the accent: print $s->substr(-1, 1); print $s->uc; # adjust case of characters according to template: # prints 'AbcDE' print $s->new('abcdE')->samecase('Xy Z'); DESCRIPTION Perl 5 offers string manipulation at the byte level (for non-upgraded strings) and at the codepoint level (for decoded strings). However it fails to provide string manipulation at the grapheme level, that is it has no easy way of treating a sequence of codepoints, in which all but the first are combining characters (like accents, for example) as one character. "Perl6::Str" tries to solve this problem by introducing a string object with an API similar to that of Perl 6 (as far as possible), and emulating common operations such as "substr", "chomp" and "chop" at the grapheme level. It also introduces builtin string methods found in Perl 6 such as "samecase". "Perl6::Str" is written in pure Perl 5. For a description of the Perl 6 "Str" type, please see . CAVEATS "Perl6::Str" is implemented in terms of a blessed reference to the underlying perl 5 string, and all operations are either overloaded operators or method calls. That means that the objects lose all their magic once they are interpolated into ordinary strings, and that all overloaded operations come with a speed penalty. Also note that it's another layer of abstraction, and as such suffers a speed limit for all operations. If speed is important to you, benchmark this module before you use it (and tell me your results please); if it's too slow, consider writing a C based version of it. METHODS All methods that expect numbers as input (like "substr") count them as graphemes, not as codepoints or bytes. new "Perl6::Str-"new($p5_str)> takes a Perl 5 string, and returns a "Perl6::Str" object. You can also use "new" as an object method, "$p6s-"new($other)>. Note that the given perl 5 string should be a decoded text string. graphs "$s->graphs" returns the number of graphemes in $s. If you think "length", think "graphs" instead. codes "$s->codes" returns the number of codepoints in $s. bytes "$s->bytes" returns the number of bytes of the NFKC-normalized and UTF-8 encoded $s. This is subject to change. chars returns the number of characters in the currently chosen Unicode level. At the moment only grapheme-level is implemented, it's currently an alias to "graphs". substr $s->substr(OFFSET) $s->substr(OFFEST, LENGTH) $s->substr(OFFSET, LENGHT, REPLACEMENT) does the same thing as the builtin "substr" function uc lc ucfirst lcfirst do the same things as the corresponding builtin functions. capitalize returns a lower case copy of the string with each first character in a word as upper case. samecase "$s->samecase($pattern)" returns a copy of $s with the case information as pattern, copied on a grapheme-by-grapheme base. If $s is longer than $pattern, the case information from the last grapheme of $pattern is copied to the remaining characters of $s. Characters without case information (like spaces and digits) leave the string unmodified. chop "$s->chop" returns a copy of $s with the last grapheme removed chomp "$s->chomp" returns a copy of $s, with the contents of $/ stripped from the end of $s. reverse returns a reversed copy of the string. COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE Copyright (C) 2008, 2011 by Moritz A. Lenz. This module is free software. You may use, redistribute and modify it under the same terms as perl itself. Example code included in this package may be used as if it were Public Domain. AUTHOR Moritz Lenz, moritz@faui2k3.org, , DEVELOPMENT You can obtain the latest development version via git: git clone git://github.com/moritz/Perl6-Str.git See also: .