CHAPTER 23Unicode, Locale, and Internationalization

There are many different languages in the world, each with its own unique set of characters; grammatical sentence structure; local conventions for the representation of dates, times, and decimal points; and myriad other details. In this chapter, we cover two of the major tools at our disposal for handling different languages and country-specific formats, Unicode and locale.

The Unicode Standard is the result of an attempt to encode all the known symbols in the world, ancient and modern, into a single unified database. Perl provides excellent support for handling Unicode, including an implicit understanding of multibyte characters, commonly known as wide characters. Wide characters are necessary ...

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